Global CO2 emissions per unit increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration provide an independent constraint on climate sensitivity over the timescale of the available data (1960-2008), suggesting that, in the short term and perhaps also in the long, climate sensitivity may lie below the values found in the general-circulation models relied upon by the IPCC.

Projected 21st-century anthropogenic warming, as the mean of values on all six IPCC emissions scenarios, is 2.8 K (IPCC, 2007, table SPM.3: Annex, Table 0). Of this, 0.6 K is stated to be in the pipeline. Of the remaining 2.2 K, some 0.65 K is attributable to non-CO2 forcings, since the CO2 fraction of anthropogenic warming is 71% (the Annex explains the derivation). Thus the IPCC’s current implicit central estimate of the warming by 2100 that will be attributable solely to the CO2 we emit this century is only 1.56 K.

The IPCC’s implicit central estimate of CO2-driven warming from 1960-2008 is at (1):

The CO2 forcing coefficient 5.35 was given in Myhre et al. (1998). Initial and final CO2 concentrations were 316.9 and 385.6 ppmv respectively (Tans, 2012). Since the 0.46 K warming driven by the CO2 fraction is 71% of anthropogenic warming, use of the IPCC’s methods implies that, as a central estimate, all of the 0.66 K observed warming from 1960-2008 (taken as the linear trend on the data over the period in HadCRUt3, 2011) was anthropogenic. However, attribution between Man and nature remains problematic: an independent approach to constraining climate sensitivity produces a very different result.

An independent constraint on climate sensitivity

Since few non-linearities will obtrude at sub-centennial time-scales, to warm the Earth’s surface by 1 K the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere must increase by 345/1.56 = 223 ppmv K–1. From 1960-2008, the trend in the ratios of annual global CO2 emissions to annual increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations does not differ significantly from zero (Fig. 1). The mean emissions/concentration-growth ratio over the period was 15.5 Gt CO2 ppmv–1, which, multiplied by 223 ppmv K–1, gives 3450 GTe CO2 K–1, the quantum of CO2 emissions necessary to raise global temperature by 1 K.

Figure 1. Near-zero trend in annual emissions/concentration-growth ratios, 1960-2008. Data and methods are described in the Annex. Spikes caused by volcanic eruptions are visible. Excluding effects of major eruptions makes little difference to the outcome.

Total global CO2 emissions from 1960-2008 were 975 Gte CO2 (Boden et al., 2011). Accordingly, CO2-driven warming expected over the period, by the present method, was 975 divided by 3450, or 0.28 K. Allowing for the non-CO2 fraction, some 0.40 K warming over the period, equivalent to 61% of observed warming, was anthropogenic, not inconsistent with the estimate in IPCC, 2007 that at least 50% of observed warming from 1950-2005 was anthropogenic. However, inconsistently with (1), this method yields a CO2-driven warming that is only 61% of the central estimate derived from the IPCC’s general-circulation models.

Implications

On the assumption that the coefficient in the CO2 forcing function, cut from 6.3 to 5.35 in Myhre et al. (1998), is now correct, one implication of the present result is that the climate-sensitivity parameter λ appropriate to a 50-year period is not 0.44 K W–1 m2, as the models suggest, but as little as 0.27 K W–1 m2. Since the value of the instantaneous or Planck sensitivity parameter λ0 is 0.31 KW–1 m2 (IPCC, 2007, p. 631 fn.), temperature feedbacks operating during the period of study may have been somewhat net-negative, rather than appreciably net-positive as implied by (1).

If feedbacks operating over the short to medium term are indeed net-negative, there is no warming in the pipeline from past emissions; in the rest of this century CO2-driven warming may be little more than 1 K; anthropogenic warming from all sources may be less than 1.5 K; and supra-centennial-scale warming may also be significantly less than currently projected. If so, all attempts at mitigation will prove cost-ineffective, and the cost of adaptation to future warming will be well below current estimates.

The author is grateful to Dr. Patrick Michaels for having drawn his attention to the near-zero-trend in the annual CO2 emissions/concentration-growth ratios that is confirmed here.

Annex: supplementary material

Values of the climate sensitivity parameter λ

If net temperature feedbacks exceed zero, the climate sensitivity parameter λ is not constant: as longer- and longer-acting feedbacks begin to act, it will tend to increase between the time of a forcing to the time when equilibrium is restored to the climate 1000-3000 years after the forcing that perturbed it (Solomon et al., 2009). Illustrative values of λ are given below.

The sensitivity parameter derived from the present result and applicable to the 49 years 1960-2008 is 0.27 K W–1 m2.

My apologies for reposting my comment from elsewhere but it does seem relevant as it provides some practical empirical evidence;

“It is said that we can observe a rise in temperatures over the past 150 years according to GISS. It goes back much further than that as I demonstrated in this recent article where I set the latest BEST figures to 1753 against the older record of CET to 1660 and my own extended CET to 1538

1) that GISS from 1880 was merely a staging post of an existing upward trend not its starting post.

2) .We can observe several notable temperature increases in the past greater than today

3) that the 400 year upward trend has lots of wavelets of natural variability contained within the boundaries of the trend

4) Whilst not included in this article I would observe that the rising trends of the past such as the Minoan, Roman and MWP lasted many hundreds of years, then came suddenly back down to earth before they started rising again.

5) that these considerable fluctuations throughout recorded history all occurred at 280ppm makes me wonder if additional co2 above this concentration has limited additional effect on temperatures.”

Two comments:
First: Forcing
The equilibrium sensitivity parameter λ taken here is not contemplating feedback mechanisms (Planck, water vapour, lapse rate, albedo, clouds). Overall it is a negative feedback that dampens (reduces) the primary warming effect about which Lord Monckton is writing in this post.
It can be represented in a loop system well known by control engineers:

If temperature changes are observed, they are the result of both primary forcing and feedback according to the transfer function: ∆T = GS•∆FGHG / (1- GF•GS)
And of course other forcing mechanisms are taking place at the same time, cyclic or not, large or weak, who actually knows?

Mass of air: 1013 mbar over 510’072’000 km2 corresponding to 5.268•10^18 kg or 1.82•10^17 kmole.
Expected CO2 concentration increase if no other carbon sink is available: (2.91•10^13/1.82•10^17) = 160 ppm
Observed concentration increase since begin of industrial era: 388 – 280 = 108 ppm
It can be interpreted that 108/160 = 68% of the total emitted carbon remained in the atmosphere and 32% were absorbed as additional biomass or as carbonates in sediments.
If carbon emissions are growing less as a consequence of economic recession in the Western World and as a result of changes in the energy mix they are still very high and pile up every year.

The big question remains: are anthropogenic carbon emissions having an effect large enough to change drastically the climatic conditions for life on Earth.
– Warmists say yes, it will be a catastrophe;
– Deniers say no, nothing of it is right;
– Skeptics say: prove it!
– Heretics say: they have some effect, but not of such importance. We can adapt. It’s not urgent. There are other priorities.

I agree with the general thrust of Monckton’s piece, but am not sure his Fig.1 is correct. When I plot the annual data on emissions (in GtC) from CDIAC (via the Global Carbon Project, Le Quere et al) against the increases in the atmospheric concentration also in GtC (from Tans, Mauna Loa), I get a poor linear fit but with a DECLINING trend which is also very statistically significant:

y = -0.0112x + 2.8823
R² = 0.0243
p=0.000000

That seems like good news to me, because it means that the emissions are growing faster than the atmospheric increases, which means in turn that the globe’s biospheres are absorbing the rising emissions at a faster rate than is ever admitted by the true believers.

This is a seriously strange analysis, seeming designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten the reader. At times it is seriously, but I am sure not deliberately, misleading. For example, Monckton accounts for warming in the pipeline going into the 21st Century, but neglects any warming in the pipeline at 2100. Any potential warming in the pipeline is the ignored in the subsequent section, which bizarrely does not proceed directly from CO2 concentrations to temperature change, but via emissions. The utility of this emissions detour seems to be included solely to permit the claim that this is a novel analysis.

“If feedbacks operating over the short to medium term are indeed net-negative, there is no warming in the pipeline from past emissions”
This can be replaced without loss of meaning, by:
“If feedbacks operating over the short to medium term are indeed net-positive, there is warming in the pipeline from past emissions”
Both sentences are logically correct, but provide no evidence to advance the argument. How is the sea-ice albedo feedback working for you this year?

An interesting corollary would be to investigate the relationship between a reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions and a reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration (for the premise of every single mitigation policy is that first and foremost a reduction in CO2 concentration will result from a reduction in CO2 emissions, after a time lag).

Global CO2 emissions per unit increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration provide an independent constraint on climate sensitivity over the timescale of the available data (1960-2008), suggesting …..
=====================
No neophyte lasted through this statement, I guarantee it.

This mathematics is irrelevant because it assumes the earth emits IR as if it were an isolated black body in a vacuum. No professional process engineer or experienced experiment physicist accepts this is possible because convection and radiation are coupled..

The real GHE is from the reduction of emissivity of the Earth’s surface in GHG IR bands by ‘Prevost Exchange’. The GHE temperature rise is because the Earth has to radiate from fewer energy transfer sites, mostly the ‘atmospheric window’ and non self-absorbing IR side-bands.

The value of the GHE is effectively fixed by the first ~900 ppmV water vapour. There can be no CO2-AGW except in the most arid of deserts.

Since there was at most 0.3 degrees Celsius global warming from all sources combined even over the 1930s to now, to ascribe 0.4 degrees to anthropogenic causes over 1960-2008 is implausible.

Average global temperatures were only around 0.3 degrees Celsius at most higher in the last several years than during the late 1930s. That is seen when using data not heavily adjusted by the CAGW movement:

1) Northern hemisphere average = only around 0.25 degrees Celsius warming over that time period, as seen at

The trick is simultaneously avoiding both of the two Big Lies of the CAGW movement on modern temperature data:

a) For temperatures prior to the 1980s, use publications of the 1970s-1980s before the subsequent era of politicized, dishonest “science.” What is illustrated and discussed in the prior links also matches the large 1930s->1960s temperature decline seen in graphs in magazines of the time before history was rewritten, such as
and

In that context, add in consideration of natural factors in warming, and substantially less than the 0.3 degrees Celsius total net warming could have been caused by all anthropogenic factors combined even over a period of the 1930s to now, let alone over the 1960s to now.

There was solar activity rise from 1.000 -> 1.032 -> 1.032 for the cycles from 1964 to 1996 A.D. in average relative inverted cosmic ray counts seen at cosmicrays.oulu.fi . (After the late 1990s, solar activity started to decline overall, but that is consistent with how global average temperatures have been flat to relatively cooling since then, at a plateau of the 60-year ocean cycle).

Such weasel words have long been decried on this blog so what’s different about this one?

ALL of these projections are little better than speculation. They should be treated as such.

If, for instance, CO2 concentration lags temperature, then the above work is probably wrong. That’s the way science works. It isn’t a problem. The problem is that the alarmists take something that could be true and treat it as if it were absolute gospel. They then pile more speculation on top and expect us to take really drastic action on that basis.

Lord Monckton provides a clear and cogent analysis (as he often does). Its main conclusion is substantiated and is

one implication of the present result is that the climate-sensitivity parameter λ appropriate to a 50-year period is not 0.44 K W–1 m2, as the models suggest, but as little as 0.27 K W–1 m2. Since the value of the instantaneous or Planck sensitivity parameter λ0 is 0.31 KW–1 m2 (IPCC, 2007, p. 631 fn.), temperature feedbacks operating during the period of study may have been somewhat net-negative, rather than appreciably net-positive as implied by (1).

This is an important conclusion because
(a) it provides an empirical observation of a serious error in the climate models (they increase estimated warming by use of positive feedback when they should reduce estimated warming by use of negative feedback)
and
(b) it leads to a novel estimate of climate sensitivity derived from empirical data instead of model curve fitting.

But at August 31, 2012 at 2:05 am you do not address the arguments and/or evidence provided in the analysis. Instead you start by saying

This is a seriously strange analysis, seeming designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten the reader. At times it is seriously, but I am sure not deliberately, misleading. For example, Monckton accounts for warming in the pipeline going into the 21st Century, but neglects any warming in the pipeline at 2100.

“Seriously strange analysis”? I assume that means you cannot fault it but you don’t like its conclusions. Your response is the only thing which seems “seriously strange” to me.

And the analysis is not “misleading”. Your error in suggesting it is “misleading” is demonstrated by your illustration. Please explain how there is “warming in the pipeline at 2100″ when – as you admit – “Monckton accounts for warming in the pipeline going into the 21st Century”. His account says,
“If feedbacks operating over the short to medium term are indeed net-negative, there is no warming in the pipeline from past emissions” so there would be no “warming in the pipeline at 2100″ for the same reasons.

And please explain the relevance of your question

How is the sea-ice albedo feedback working for you this year?

Frankly, if your post is the best you can do as a ‘warmist’ response to the analysis then you would have done better to have avoided making a post.

I am an empiricist; I only trust hard, measured data. On the subject of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity, the only thing that can actually be measured is total climate sensitivity; how much do global temperatures rise as a result of a given rise in the amount of CO2 in the atmopshere. In theory we can measure total climate sensitivity. We can measure how much CO2 concentrations rise; we can measure how much atmospheric temperatures rise, assuming they are still rising. All we need to do is to prove how much of any observed temperature rise is due to the change in CO2 concentration.

What I cannot understand is why there is so little interest in making an attempt to actually measure total climate sensitivity. If we could actually measure it, it would be like a Michelson/Morley moment; it would settle whether CAGW exists for all time.

The basic fact is, the global temperature record over the last century and more — and many “skeptics” have pointed this out, with graphs — shows global cooling from about 1880 to 1910, warming from about 1910 to 1940, cooling again from 1940 to 197(5), and warming again from 1975 to near 2000 (and now cooling again). There is even a well-known theory about this (involving multidecadal ocean oscillations, on top of an apparent recovery from the so-called Little Ice Age, since the 17th century). A good number of researchers have pointed out that the CO2 atmospheric concentration has gone up throughout that period, and have reasonably claimed that therefore CO2 cannot be blamed for the up and down temperature record. Believers — and that is all they are, believers — only muddy the debate with their attempts to distinguish between “forcings” and “feedbacks”, in that up and down temperature situation.

The period 1960 to 2008, considered by Christopher Monckton here, is from the middle of a cooling period to a little past the end of a warming period, so temperatures have gone both up and down in that period, while CO2 has definitely continued to rise. Does he think this is an optimal test of CO2 “forcing”? In this, he is ignoring a basic fact in the longer temperature record that speaks against any CO2-driven “climate sensitivity” at all, and apparently finds what so many others have pointed out, simply from looking at those wider up and down periods: That the temperature is NOT driven by CO2, period. I think they did by simple observation better than Mr. Monckton has done here with the sorts of naive equations (dT = λ dF) favored by the incompetent consensus scientists. “Lukewarm” believers like him curry (whoa — Judith Curry is another one) to the consensus theory, instead of decisively breaking with it, as they should.

If you ignore the simple evidence of the up and down temperature record vs. the monotonically rising CO2 — solely in order to maintain there is, there MUST BE, a “greenhouse effect”, of increasing temperature with increasing atmospheric CO2 — then you are all too likely, in your fevered belief in that dogma, to dismiss any claims of definitive disproof of that effect. How could such disproof have been missed, by all of climate science, all these years? If, on the other hand, you don’t ignore the ample, indeed overwhelming and simple, evidence just noted, against the greenhouse effect, put forward time and time again, then you probably already know by now that there is such definitive evidence. The only trouble is, you will have to admit that climate scientists have been, and stubbornly continue to be, fundamentally deluded by their (clearly) false theories, and that there is therefore — and regretfully, considering the attention of the world is focused upon it — no competent climate science in the world today.

We all make mistakes, even embarrassing ones like this one of mine. But people need to start learning from their mistakes, rather than stubbornly passing them down to the next generation. There is no greenhouse effect, of increasing temperature with increasing CO2.

Since the 1975-2005 warming was just a part of natural AMO/PDO positive cycle, indistinguishable from 1910-1940 period, all these calculations are useless. Just see the model projections: exponential curve copying the Keeling curve, nothing as real world. All these lambdas and formulas are trying to fit the radiative fantasy playstation models onto the 30-year warming trend.
Oh and the cold water appears in the NINO region again. Who would say that?

The climate is always warming or cooling. It’s called natural variability. It’s what the planet does. Spitting a bit of CO2 into the atmosphere isn’t going to change what the planet wants to do.

These attempts to estimate climate sensitivity are baseless and futile. Scientists should focus on working out how natural variability works. When they can nail that, then everything else will fall into place.

With respect, your post misses the point of Lord Monckton’s analysis in his article above.

Lord Monckton often assesses ‘mainstream’ climate information and arguments with a view to determine if the ‘mainstream’ conclusions are validly derived. His above analysis is an example of this procedure and it provides an important finding.

His above analysis indicates the ‘mainstream’ analysis of climate sensitivity uses an erroneous assumption of positive feedback when empirical data indicates a negative feedback exists in reality. Correcting for this error induces the ‘mainstream’ projection of future global warming to be a trivial degree of warming.

This correction is important. It requires a response from those who support the ‘mainstream’ to
(a) demonstrate that Lord Monckton’s analysis is wrong
or
(b) to admit their own methods indicate that fears of dangerous AGW are unfounded.

But you say many people (including me) say observed changes to global temperature are explicable by apparent climate cycles (notably a ~900 year cycle and a ~60 year cycle). But so what? Discussion of such apparent cycles distracts from Lord Monckton’s analysis and its important conclusion.

And you also say many people (including me) say there is no clear evidence that atmospheric CO2 concentration is a significant determinant of global temperature and much evidence suggests it is not. But so what? Discussion of that also distracts from Lord Monckton’s analysis and its important conclusion.

Simply, contrary to your assertion, Lord Monckton has not made a “mistake”: he has provided an analysis which indicates the ‘mainstream’ method uses an erroneous assumption.

Jim Cripwell- “What I cannot understand is why there is so little interest in making an attempt to actually measure total climate sensitivity.”

Sherwood Idso in 1998 and Willis Eschenbach recently both made the attempt.

One method takes the measured temperature difference between winter and summer at one location, divided by the measured difference in total solar irradiance at the top of atmosphere (or the measured difference in total solar irradiance at the surface) at the same location between winter and summer. Repeat in as many locations as measured data is available.

The result is 0.1 C per W/m^2 or less, indicating strong negative feedback mechanisms are in play.

While scientific debate over carbon will no doubt continue for some time, it seems utterly obvious that CO2 emissions will be reduced, importantly or not, along with harmful emissions in a very big way in the coming years. Looking at the enormous nuclear power building boom currently being planned and undertaken, whereby China alone is anticipating 600 reactors in the next 30 years and 1800 reactors by turn of the century, it’s seems clear to me that electricity will be produced
in the future with few emissions, that fast reactors will turn that “nuclear waste” first into gold (fast reactors burning our current stockpile of “nuclear waste” can provide all the power this country needs for 1000 years) and then into a small pile of low radioactive matter,easily stored and returning to background levels within a few generations. We have plenty of uranium that can be mined and an inexhaustible supply that can be extracted from seawater, at a cost that won’t bankrupt the consumer. There are even new reactor designs that can operate as non-baseload
generators.
And few would doubt that practical and affordable batteries will arrive in the relatively near term, removing auto emissions from the picture.
So, in a sense, debate about carbon and its effects is only important as a means of preventing any more costly and self defeating “solutions” like solar and wind from bankrupting the country and achieving virtually nothing. The world is becoming emission free despite, rather than because
of the antics of the hysterical warmists, out to save the world from itself , much in the same fashion as the very similar fundamentalist religious reformers of the 1880’s. Warmists are today’s
evangelists, saving the world from the sins of mankind. They just avoid all that God stuff.
They need a real job.

re your OT comment that Richard Black is leaving the BBC. The AGW-scare is slowly fading away, and your news brings to mind mentions of rats and sinking ships.

Many have shot holes in the AGW-scare, and the above analysis by Lord Monckton launches another torpedo at the foundering scare. But the killer round struck home at the failed Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.

Now, it is important to keep up the attack until the scare sinks out of sight. Importantly, we need to recover the reputation of science which has been damaged by the scare, and the activities of people such as Lord Monckton are needed to achieve that.

Such weasel words have long been decried on this blog so what’s different about this one?
___________________________________
You are missing the whole point of the exercise. Monckton has taken the points made by IPCC and the climate scientists and showed even using their OWN points CO2 will not have the effect the IPCC states. In such a situation, using the oppositions arguments and not your own, of course you would use “weasel words”

Remember the entire point of the IPCC exercise is to show mankind’s use of energy causes a major “Tipping Point” and a CATASTROPHE. Without a catastrophe politicians and bureaucrats especially in the UN would not have a reason for seizing a great deal of power and money. That is why CO2 must causes positive net forcings in water vapor so the models can take the CO2 forcing and multiply it by a factor of three. (Got to get that catastrophe some how) The fact that CO2 has been much higher in the past and the earth has not burned up and all the water vapor boiled off to space as well as other indications the water vapor net feed back is negative is completely ignored. It does not “Fit” the catastrophe scenario.

Then there is the other bit of IPCC fudging of the data called Judithgate The lead author on the team about the effects of the sun on the earth’s climate was not even a solar physicist. She was also co-author of the key paper that showed the sun’s TSI was constant.

The interesting part is the data she used was from other scientists who were solar physicists and protested in vain that she and her co-author did not know what the heck they were doing. The letters of protest with explanations are included in the link above.

The fraud was so blatant, an author passing judgement on her own work, that the Norwegian government made this complaint.

I urge IPCC to consider having only one solar physicist on the lead author team of such an important chapter. In particular since the conclusion of this section hangs on one single paper in which Judith Lean is the co-author.”

Luboš Motl, a physicist, was scathing about her credentials as a “Solar” Physicist link

So if the sun did change in intensity, as Dr. R.C. Willson (head of the ACRIM satellites) and Douglas Hoyt, “the people, who were in charge of the satellites and who created the original graphs (the best world astro-physicists: Doug Hoyt, Richard C.Willson)” indicate, then the IPCC has drastically underestimated the solar forcing and everything else has to be adjusted DOWN accordingly.

richardscourtney says:
August 31, 2012 at 6:55 am
Garry Stotel:
re your OT comment that Richard Black is leaving the BBC. The AGW-scare is slowly fading away, and your news brings to mind mentions of rats and sinking ships.
===============
It is an amazing turn around. However, there are still hundreds of billions being wasted by governments in the name of “saving the planet”, while destroying the economy. Solving CO2 pollution by shipping manufacturing industries to China and India. Using taxpayer money.

As usual, a very nice presentation. However, as the IPCC models, etc, ignore convection and the huge negative feedback of the water cycle, the contention remains that, if CO2 caused any warming, it would only serve to ramp up the water cycle and increase energy loss to space.

Furthermore, as IR absorption by CO2 and water vapor during the day is effectively a wash, emitting in both directions in the face of overwhelming solar input, it is at night that CO2 and water vapor would serve to convert one way, heat energy into IR, and facilitate IR loss to space. These, thus, serve to cool the planet. Remember how fast the air can cool shortly after the sun goes down—that’s CO2 and water vapor doing their job.

And, also, as CO2 appears to replace absolute water vapor content in the air, the overall effect of more CO2 is to have a less effective factor which converts ever so little energy to heat during the day. Increased CO2 could conceivably cause a negligible amount of cooling, but more likely no effect.

I am always concerned when there are attempts to calculate the change in temperature with such precision (or is that accuracy…..) when basing everything on the amount of CO2 in the air ignores the roles of water and the sun, to name two. Water has the double effect of being radiatively active around the same places as CO2 and there is up to 100 tiimes as much water in the air as CO2, plus there is the large effect of evaporation-convection-condensation of water, which (I have read more than once) is much effective in moving heat upward than radiation and CO2. I won’t even go into the solar effects, but they are also believed to be considerably more powerful than CO2 and radiation.
I can understand that Lord Monckton is using the weapons of the warmists against them in his analysis, but doing so only adds credibility to their analysis. IMHOWIR, it would have been better just to leave all references to CO2 and radiation for dumping into that famous dustbin of history.

Many thanks to everyone who has been kind enough to join this discussion. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Courtney for his generous and helpful comments: it is good to have the agreement of an IPCC reviewer. As he rightly discerns, my purpose in this very short paper is to demonstrate, by a method that is as independent as possible of the computer models, that the models’ central estimates are excessive.

Louise complains that I have qualified my results rather than proclaiming them as definitive: however, since it is not possible to distinguish clearly between natural and anthropogenic effects, and since all of the source data are subject to uncertainties, caution seems scientifically appropriate. As a Huxleian skeptic, I am skeptical of my own arguments (which is one reason why I publish them here from time to time, so as to get some feedback from the scientific community).

In answer to Michel, The Annex to the paper has a brief discussion of various values for the climate-sensitivity parameter lambda in the fundamental equation of climate sensitivity. The values mentioned in the paper itself indeed include all feedbacks that have acted (or will have acted) over the relevant timescales. The equilibrium-sensitivity parameter, mentioned in passing in the paper, includes the full action of all feedbacks over the 1000-3000 years to equilibrium.

Mr. Curtin says his results differ from those that I have plotted in Fig. 1. My results (which are in line with previous results by Dr. Pat Michaels) may be verified by checking the data in the tables in the Annex: but they would not reproduce on the blog, so you will need to download the .pdf for that. If Mr. Curtin is right, that is further good news: for it indicates that the biosphere, far from taking up a declining fraction of the CO2 we emit, are doing the opposite.

Mr. Telford takes me to task for not considering warming in the pipeline beyond 2100. Well, my paper compared observations since 1960 with projections up to 2100. Within that short time-frame, non-linearities are not likely to be significant. The reason why I stated that if feedbacks over the period of study are net-negative then there is no warming in the pipeline is that the 0.6 K in-the-pipeline warming that the IPCC predicts for this century solely as a result of our past sins of emission will not occur. With only 1 K warming from CO2, and another 0.4 K from other greenhouse gases, the anthropogenic warming of the 21st century could be as little as 1.4 K. And, if short-term feedbacks are negative, it is not particularly likely that there will be much in-the-pipeline warming after 2100 either.

Mr. Telford also finds my analysis “strange” because, he says, I argue from CO2 emissions to global warming rather than from CO2 concentrations to warming. On the contrary: I have acted on the basis that the IPCC may be correct in finding that increases in our emissions of CO2 are responsible for increases in its atmospheric concentration; I have determined by a straightforward analysis the ratio of annual emissions to annual concentration changes; I have deduced from the IPCC’s own central estimates the ratio of concentration changes to temperature change that it considers likely; I have applied that ratio to total global CO2 emissions since 1960; and I have found that the IPCC’s central estimates of CO2-driven warming over the period are overstated by almost two-thirds.

AlecM says the mathematics is irrelevant because it makes assumptions about the Earth’s radiative characeristics. The only assumptions I have made are those that the IPCC itself makes. It is not my intention to question whether there is a greenhouse effect: merely to show, using the IPCC’s own methods and comparing them with real-world data, that the IPCC’s central climate-sensitivity estimates are considerably overstated. AlecM concludes that because the radiative forcing capacity of the atmosphere is near saturation the only locations where any significant CO2 forcing may occur are arid deserts. He will find interesting to look at Dr. Murry Salby’s investigation into latitudinal variabilities in the distribution of CO2 concentration. the highest concentration of CO2 appears to be in the mountain-girt Taklamakan Desert, where very few humans live.

Henry Clark says that there was only 0.3 K warming from the 1930s to the present, so I ought not to have calculated that there was 0.4 K warming in the 49 year 1960-2008. However, I have merely followed the data. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the HadCRUt3 data over the period is 0.66 K, and the IPCC’s method indicates that 0.66 K of anthropogenic warming has occurred over the period. My own method indicates that it is only 0.4 K, or about 61% of all warming over the period.

Mr. Huffman asks whether the period of study, 1960-2008, is optimal. No, it is sub-optimal, in that it encompasses an entire warming cycle of the great ocean oscillations but not quite an entire cooling cycle. Optimally, one should consider climate over 60-year periods, and one should only consider lesser periods if they are centered on a phase-transition in the ocean oscillations. However, the data relevant to my analysis are only available from 1960 onwards, so I have taken the longest period available to me.

I agree with Mr. Huffman that the correlation between the monotonically-rising CO2 concentration and the stochastically-fluctuating temperature curve is poor, and that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. However, one should be careful to apply this logical consideration correctly. It is the fluctuations in the temperature curve that are not accounted for by CO2: however, it is logically possible (and I consider it likely) that CO2 is exercising a gentle uipward influence on the temperature trend, for there is a greenhouse effect, well established by repeated observation and experiment over the past 200 years. However, for reasons including those set out in the present paper, I do not consider it likely that the upward trend in global temperature will be as rapid as the IPCC has predicted.

Skeptical says one should not try to establish climate sensitivity at all. It may seem surprising, but I have some sympathy with this point of view. My own approach is to take the data and the IPCC’s arguments, put them together, draw logical conclusions using simple mathematical methods, and demonstrate that, even if the premises of their arguments is correct, their conclusion does not follow. This is a very powerful technique, known to the ancient Greeks as elenchus – arguing as far as possible on the opponent’s own ground, and showing him that even on his own terms he is not correct.

While scientific debate over carbon will no doubt continue for some time, it seems utterly obvious that CO2 emissions will be reduced, importantly or not, along with harmful emissions in a very big way in the coming years. Looking at the enormous nuclear power building boom currently being planned and undertaken, whereby China alone is anticipating 600 reactors in the next 30 years and 1800 reactors by turn of the century, it’s seems clear to me that electricity will be produced
in the future with few emissions….
____________________________
That is in China and India. Russia is moving forward with plans for doubling nuclear energy output by 2020. Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia already have nuclear planning firmly in place.

I fear we may be straying OT but I cannot resist the temptation to add to your post at August 31, 2012 at 7:40 am which says

It is an amazing turn around. However, there are still hundreds of billions being wasted by governments in the name of “saving the planet”, while destroying the economy. Solving CO2 pollution by shipping manufacturing industries to China and India. Using taxpayer money.

I cannot agree more.

Indeed, I keep posting on WUWT that we need to learn from the ‘acid rain’ scare. Few now remember that scare unless reminded of it. But laws and the bureaucracies to operate those laws were introduced by that scare and they continue to do harm. A clear example is the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) that sets limits on ‘acid rain’ emissions from power stations. The bureaucrats who operate the LCPD need to justify their jobs so they keep making ever more pointless and always more expensive emission limits.

As the AGW-scare dies its proponents will attempt to keep the effects they desire alive by continuing to use the AGW-scare as an excuse to impose similar rules and bureaucracies to the LCPD. A bureaucracy never dies and is difficult to kill.

We need champions who will lead the fight to ensure such bureaucracies are still-born. Lord Monckton has the background in understanding both AGW and politics to be such a champion, but there are few others.

Thank you Lord Monckton for your courteous answer. Bear in mind that I was not criticising your work, only that after intensive study of the 6 basic mistakes in IPCC ‘science’ , I have concluded the real GHE is, as only an engineer can envisage, so simple as to be laughable.

GHGs in IR self-absorption [~200 ppmV for CO2] switch off that band’s emission at the surface.so there can be no CO2-AGW. The GHE is fixed by the first ~900 ppmV water vapour.

As for the rest of the IPCC’s scientific house of cards, it’s fairly obvious to anyone with reasonable knowledge of the statistical thermodynamics’ thinking of J Willard Gibbs and the radiation physics of Gustav Kirchhoff and Max Planck that there can be no direct thermalisation of real absorbed IR, a fifth of that claimed by the IPCC once you kick out the perpetual motion machine of imaginary ‘back radiation’, false science taught to meteorologists.

Instead the GHGs act as an energy transfer medium with indirect thermalisation mostly at clouds, the rest going to space or back to the ground as ‘Prevost Exchange’ [Auguste le Prevost, 1791]. This serious lack of the scientific and engineering reasoning I was taught at imperial College in the 1960s has led to a monster, a non-science.

Thus the clouds disperse thermal IR energy into grey body IR, a lot of it in the atmospheric window, a short circuit to space. This is why cloud spectra are so different to clear air spectra! This control system is wonderful to see once you clear away Aarhenius’ childish construct.

chris y you write “The result is 0.1 C per W/m^2 or less, indicating strong negative feedback mechanisms are in play.”

Thanks for the reference. However, I take major exception to the quote above. You seem to be assuming that it has been established beyond reasonable doubt that the value for the no-feedback climate sensitiviy has been established as being significant, thus requiring a strong negative feedback to explain the low value of total climate sensitivity.

On the other hand, if the value of the no-feedback sensitivity is, in fact, indistinguishable from zero, as I believe it is, then a low value of total climate sensitivity is completely understandable, with no need to resort to a strong negative feedback. My suspicion is that this explanation is the more likely of the two..

Climate models are filled with educated as well as WAGed fudge factors. It’s what makes the “runs” scenarios instead of predictions. I have no issue with climate models as they are currently formulated. They are very good at determining that the null hypothesis remains intact.

The biggest problem with this analysis is completely inherited from the CAGW proposal that it analyzes. CO_2 is only one component of a highly multivariate problem. I recognize that the point is to show that there are data at hand that do not support the “catastrophic” assignment of overall climate sensitivity, but AR5 already has backed off considerably from this (and I expect will back off still more for every year that CO_2 continues to rise but global temperatures remain more or less trendless, which is yet another constraint on sensitivity). Sadly, ALL of this analysis is across a range of times that is almost invisibly short on a geological scale, on a timescale that is short even compared to KNOWN important timescales of natural variability (e.g. decadal oscillations) and with the Sun in an unusual, if not unique on a timescale of centuries to thousands of years, state of high activity in the latter half of the 20th century. We are fleas trying to predict the height of a dog by looking at the best fit function to a hair on its ass with this kind of analysis.

IMO the only place and way — and I do mean only — that we will be able to quantitatively pin down the overall GHE in a way that can be quantitatively fit and understood is with TOA and BOA spectroscopy. TOA because in the end, the ONLY thing that matters as far as cooling the Earth is concerned is the integrated outgoing average power on a suitably coarse grained averaging interval and how that radiation is distributed. Even that isn’t enough to infer the actual “warming”, because temperature is not enthalpy, especially not with 70% of the Earth’s surface covered with seawater that serves as a huge heat buffer with multiple timescales stretching up higher than 1000 years. BOA spectroscopy provides at least a handle on the local blackbody temperature differential between surface temperatures and TOA emission temperatures across the spectrum, as well as a direct measure of the backradiation from the absorbing greenhouse bands that add to the surface budget of power that has to locally be balanced in dynamic quasi-equilibrium. Even that is perhaps too complex to quantitatively treat, but at least one could look for correlated trends in the data over a sufficiently long time series.

Perhaps 50 years, perhaps 100. More than 30, especially when we are not systematically measuring what we need to measure at the TOA even now, let alone at the BOA. Hell, we can’t even get straight thermometry right.

before we can recover the reputation of science we need to recover its proper practice.

I very, very strongly agree, and I hope some of my posts on WUWT demonstrate that I agree. Indeed, if you look back at my posts you can see the ferocity with which I attack pseudoscience. I provide an example below.

Science
consists of determining the nearest possible approximation to ‘truth’ by formulating ideas then attempting to find information which refutes those ideas and amending or rejecting those ideas on the basis of obtained information.

Pseudoscience
consists of deciding an idea is ‘truth’ and attempting to find information which supports the idea and ignores information which rejects the idea.

I have copied a post in this thread and intend to you use it as an example of pure pseudoscience when explaining the difference between science and pseudoscience. The example is this:

Jan P Perlwitz says:
August 21, 2012 at 5:57 pm

E.M.Smith, you wrote:

As a professional programmer and someone who has managed production software products to and post shipment, it is my professional opinion that the GIStemp code is “not fit for purpose”.

Well, I look forward to your publication in a peer reviewed climate journal then where you lay out the evidence that the GISS temperature analysis is all bogus. And where you show that the results and scientific conclusions from your own “correctly” done analysis differ significantly from the GISS analysis. Otherwise nothing of what you claim to have allegedly found is of any scientific relevance.

All information pertinent to an idea is of “scientific relevance”.
In this case, the idea is that the method used by GISS is correct.

A scientific response to EM Smith would have been,
“Please be specific in stating the places where you found the alleged errors so we can investigate them.”

A pseudoscientific response to EM Smith is,
“I have found an excuse which I will use to ignore your alleged errors; i.e. I will pretend the information does not exist – or is not of scientific relevance – unless it is published in a manner and a place I specify”.

richardscourtney says:
August 31, 2012 at 6:55 am
…Now, it is important to keep up the attack until the scare sinks out of sight. Importantly, we need to recover the reputation of science which has been damaged by the scare, and the activities of people such as Lord Monckton are needed to achieve that….
_______________________
Unfortunately that genie is not going to go back into the bottle. As I have shown in other comments, it is not just CAGW where the science is suspect. Medicine especially, as well as pyschology has made front page news recently because of fraudulent science.

Perhaps it is just as well that the masses understand scientists are not gods or priests but instead are ordinary humans and are just as prone to the vices of humanity. Vices such as Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Apathy, Vainglory, Pride and perhaps the worst for a scientist, the need to belong to a group and therefore the fear of speaking out against the general “Consensus”

A useful thread. Many thanks to Lord Monckton, who also made my favourite sky-diving video. But what is this “pipeline?” I thought radiation was the mechanism driving AGW. Radiation is almost instantaneous, is it not?

“And few would doubt that practical and affordable batteries will arrive in the relatively near term, removing auto emissions from the picture.” — Kent Beuchert

Count me among those “few,” Kent.

“Such weasel words have long been decried on this blog so what’s different about this one?” — Louise

Words like ‘may,’ ‘might,’ ‘suggesting,’ and the like have always been part of scientists’ lexicon. I’ve said so here previously. They have, however, been used carelessly by GW fanatics, more so by abstract and headline writers, and often been totally omitted by journalists.

As is your usual practice, you make good points at August 31, 2012 at 10:04 am.

I have devised a possible method for determining the effective emission height as a function of temperature and GHG concentration. It isolates effects of solar and surface radiations over near identical conditions by using the onset (and the end) of solar eclipse totality. I have twice attempted the experiment: in Cornwall where weather prevented the measurements, and in Zambia where the experiment was prevented by a mongoose biting the power cable at a critical moment (yes, I know everybody thinks that is funny but it is a matter of great sadness to me).

I’m afraid there’s a schoolboy error by Monckton: if the rate of annual increase in CO2 concentration is proportional to the annual amount of carbon emissions, that does not mean that CO2 concentration is proportional to total emissions: a constant of integration been omitted.

In fact total anthropogenic emissions match very well to atmospheric CO2 concentration (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/emissionsvsconc.png/). But the graph does not go through the origin – there was a CO2 concentration of around 280 ppm before the industrial revolution when emissions were zero. If you just take the slope of the plot, as Monckton did, to convert from emissions to concentration and hence derive a temperature increase, you get the wrong answer.

If the calculation is done properly from this plot, the warming predicted from anthropogenic emissions is precisely the same as that predicted from concentration: Monckton’s analysis produces no independent constraint at all!

In fact, Monnett and Gleason’s 2005 paper do put just such a context on their observations: “Although a number of published papers have discussed implications of climate change on polar bears, to date, mortality due to swimming has not been identified as an associated risk.”

I would welcome expansion/explanation of the points in your post at August 31, 2012 at 12:18 pm.

You say

I’m afraid there’s a schoolboy error by Monckton: if the rate of annual increase in CO2 concentration is proportional to the annual amount of carbon emissions, that does not mean that CO2 concentration is proportional to total emissions: a constant of integration been omitted.

But if the “total anthropogenic emissions match very well to atmospheric CO2 concentration” then what is the problem?
Where is the “schoolboy error”?
What relevance is the “constant of integration”?

And you assert

If you just take the slope of the plot, as Monckton did, to convert from emissions to concentration and hence derive a temperature increase, you get the wrong answer.

If the calculation is done properly from this plot, the warming predicted from anthropogenic emissions is precisely the same as that predicted from concentration: Monckton’s analysis produces no independent constraint at all!

Really? Lord Monckton did not do the calculation “properly”?
How should he have done it?

You ask

Who’s making things up here?

I answer: you are “making things up here” unless and until you explain how you think Lord Monckton should have done the calculation and why.

The rest of your post is about polar bears. But this thread has no relevance of any kind to polar bears. Perhaps you included the stuff about polar bears as ‘filler’ to distract from the fact that the remainder of your post says nothing but,instead, makes unsubstantiated assertions?

I eagerly await your detailed answers to my questions which I am sure you are as eager to provide as I am to obtain them because you would not want people to think you have made a “schoolboy error”.

Chuckle. But you know that. My entire participation (such as it is) in Global Climate or Climate Change or whatever one would like to call it is an utterly unfunded, unproductive hobby that has proven to be mostly a waste of time, as was an earlier hobby of trying to convince devout Christians that there was some small chance that Genesis was mythology, not fact, that the story of Noah and his ark was absurd beyond compare, that Moses (contrary to popular opinion) was a genocidal, femicidal, infanticidal murder (see Numbers 31, for example) that today would be tried for war crimes and murder many times over, generously accepting the proposition that Moses existed at all and isn’t just a legend or out and out myth (given a complete lack of corroboratory archeological evidence and a certain amount of absurdity, e.g. spending 40 years making a journey that is at most a few weeks on foot today).

Climate Science is a bizarre mix of similar religious belief and snippets of reason and science, where the latter are utterly incapable of causing any human being participating to shift their religious beliefs regarding the matter by an iota.

At the moment, my current windmill to tilt at is a clear model for the pure radiative greenhouse effect, one that reduces it to first year thermo plus Stefan-Boltzmann ONLY and proves that the second law of thermodynamics is NOT violated by it. This of course doesn’t prove that CO_2 increases do or do not increase global temperature averages — the climate system is complex and involves heat transport, the lapse rate, the differential transparency of the atmosphere to different wavelengths as one ascends the air column to lower pressure/density that you allude to, complex feedback from clouds and water vapor modulating albedo and heat transport, aerosols, heat transport and release from the oceans, particulates, and other things I’m probably forgetting.

But establishing that one of the primary theses of the Skydragon Slayers is nonsense seems like it would still be worthwhile, simply because they are embarrassing and give skeptics a bad name with their terrible physics. As you say, being a skeptic of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is not an excuse for bad science or weak arguments. The top article here is not bad science, although it isn’t any better than the weak science it directly addresses so it isn’t terribly strong. But Monckton doesn’t go around asserting that there is no such thing as the GHE, because he knows a) sure there is; and b) if he did, people would — with good reason — laugh at him. Science doesn’t involve belonging to a named group or supporting a book that is really pretty humorous where it isn’t sad.

“…value for the no-feedback climate sensitivity has been established…”

I assume a blackbody radiator as the starting point. P = 5.67E-8 * T^4. Increasing T from 288 to 289 K requires about 5.5 W/m^2 of additional incoming intensity. That gives about 0.2 C per W/m^2 for sensitivity. At warmer temperatures it is lower, cooler temperatures it is higher.

No, I didn’t “know that” and – although it was in hope not expectation – my question was serious.

I am not sure of your intent with all the Biblical allusions. Perhaps it was intended as a ‘wind up’ because of my request. If so then it missed its mark: were you to attend next Sunday morning then my sermon concurs with your points about Genesis, Noah and Moses.

And I am not sure which “book” to which you refer but if it is the IPCC AR4 then I fail to see its humour.

richardscourtney says:
August 31, 2012 at 5:30 am:
“His above analysis indicates the ‘mainstream’ analysis of climate sensitivity uses an erroneous assumption of positive feedback when empirical data indicates a negative feedback exists in reality. Correcting for this error induces the ‘mainstream’ projection of future global warming to be a trivial degree of warming.”
==============================================

The concept of “greenhouse gases warming” excludes a negative feedback. You can not have both at the same time.

If the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” is correct, then you generally must have more warming if you have more “greenhouse gases” (until the effect is saturated). If warming increases concentration of water vapour in the air and water vapour is a “greenhouse gas”, then you will inevitably get more warming, this is a positive feedback.

Logically, if there is a proven negative feedback, then it proves the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” to be false. But, as I said, you can not have both at the same time.

From introductory calculus you may recall that if the rate of change of two variables, dy/dt and dx/dt, are proportional with a constant k, the variable themselves will related by y = k x + c, where c is the constant of integration.

If you didn’t do calculus, you should be aware that in general you need both the slope and intercept of a straight-line relationship to convert between two parameters (e.g. Celsius and Fahrenheit).

Monckton has assumed that the intercept is zero between total emissions atmospheric concentration (or alternatively omitted the constant of integration). But it isn’t – there was a little less than 300 ppm of CO2 before any emissions by humans. Hence his calculation of the temperature increase based on a single value for emissions is just wrong. Just as for concentration, a ratio of emissions is required to derive the change in temperature. Monckton’s inclusion of emissions provides absolutely no independent constraint on the climate sensitivity.

What with this basic analytical error, and an attack on Gore which rather shows him to be the one “making things up”, Monckton has not had his finest week.

I would welcome expansion/explanation of the points in your post at August 31, 2012 at 12:18 pm.

You say

I’m afraid there’s a schoolboy error by Monckton: if the rate of annual increase in CO2 concentration is proportional to the annual amount of carbon emissions, that does not mean that CO2 concentration is proportional to total emissions: a constant of integration been omitted.

But if the “total anthropogenic emissions match very well to atmospheric CO2 concentration” then what is the problem?
Where is the “schoolboy error”?
What relevance is the “constant of integration”?

If dCO2/dt=k*dE/dt where E is Emissions
then CO2=k*E + C where C is the constant of integration

therefore CO2 is proportional to (E-C/k) not proportional to E
from the data CO2 is proportional to E+10^6
i.e. CO2= (E+10^6)/3855.8
NOT CO2=E/3855.8

If you just take the slope of the plot, as Monckton did, to convert from emissions to concentration and hence derive a temperature increase, you get the wrong answer.

If the calculation is done properly from this plot, the warming predicted from anthropogenic emissions is precisely the same as that predicted from concentration: Monckton’s analysis produces no independent constraint at all!

“If the facts are against you, pound on the law. If the law is against you, pound on the facts.”

Sounds like a witty adage – except for it isn’t. The law simply assesses the facts, well, in light of what the law actually says. It is not meaningful to pound on either one independently. Anyway, are you trying to imply that I have previously try to bring forward either the law or facts in vain?

“You are missing the whole point of the exercise. Monckton has taken the points made by IPCC and the climate scientists and showed even using their OWN points CO2 will not have the effect the IPCC states. In such a situation, using the oppositions arguments and not your own, of course you would use “weasel words””

The problem that I see is that Monckton’s stooping to use their own points gives some level of credibility to the incredible. They are wrong in so many ways that this analysis is like swatting at mosquitoes with a sledge hammer. Or perhaps picking at fly droppings on a dung pile is even a better analogy.

Thankyou for your post at August 31, 2012 at 2:08 pm which answers a question I put to Tom P.

You say

If dCO2/dt=k*dE/dt where E is Emissions
then CO2=k*E + C where C is the constant of integration

therefore CO2 is proportional to (E-C/k) not proportional to E
from the data CO2 is proportional to E+10^6
i.e. CO2= (E+10^6)/3855.8
NOT CO2=E/3855.8

I do not agree because Lord Monkton says in explanation of his analysis

Since few non-linearities will obtrude at sub-centennial time-scales, to warm the Earth’s surface by 1 K the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere must increase by 345/1.56 = 223 ppmv K–1. From 1960-2008, the trend in the ratios of annual global CO2 emissions to annual increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations does not differ significantly from zero (Fig. 1). The mean emissions/concentration-growth ratio over the period was 15.5 Gt CO2 ppmv–1, which, multiplied by 223 ppmv K–1, gives 3450 GTe CO2 K–1, the quantum of CO2 emissions necessary to raise global temperature by 1 K.

n.b. “the trend in the ratios of annual global CO2 emissions to annual increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations does not differ significantly from zero”

However, it is Lord Monckton’s analysis so I leave it to him to explain the point.

Thankyou for a sensible answer which is a stark contrast to that of Tom P.

richardscourtney says:
August 31, 2012 at 2:29 pm:
“Rubbish! Absolutely untrue! Complete nonsense! Get back to me when you have gained at least a basic knowledge of what you are talking about because then we can have a rational discussion of it.”
=====================================================

Richard, you do realise that this is not just our private conversation, we are talking on an open forum, don’t you? You do not need to convince me in the first place, convince the thousands of readers. And even the less experienced readers know that argumentation like “get the knowledge and then we talk” indicates that the person saying that just does not like the message and has no arguments.

[can you guys – that’s both of you – begin to play nice please? I’d hate to intervene in a good rational debate. ~ac]

Once again I am grateful to Dr. Courtney for explaining to Tom P that the equation of a straight line need not be expressed in terms of calculus. In Fig. 1, I expressed the equation in the standard linear algebraic form: y = ax + c, where a (in this instance near-zero) is the slope and c is the y-intercept: namely, the point at which the line crosses the y axis (at x = 0). Since the slope is very close to zero, it ought to have come as no surprise to Tom P that the y-intercept is close to the mean value of y across the entire period of study, which is a little above 15.5 Gte CO2 of emissions per part per million by volume of CO2 concentration change.

As I had pointed out in an earlier answer, a longer period of study would have been desirable, but reliable values for both emissions and concentration changes were not available before 1960 or after 2008, the last year for which well-corrected values are available. Over the period of study, It is of course permissible to do the calculation as I did it, and, in my submission, it is not unreasonable to draw the conclusions I drew.

If Tom P would prefer to do the calculation differently, then – instead of making the schoolboy howler of insisting on the use of calculus (and an incorrect use at that) where simple algebra suffices – he should redo the calculation to demonstrate, as rigorously and as transparently as I did, what he thinks the answers should have been, so that Dr. Courtney and I can examine his calculations and I can decide whether or to what extent I should modify my result. That is how a genuine “seeker after truth” – Al-Haytham’s beautiful phrase for the scientist – would conduct his end of the discussion.

However, I am afraid, from the sneering tone of the anonymous Tom P’s contributions, that it is not clear he is a genuine seeker after truth. Instead, he appears to be making a maladroit attempt at misdirection, introducing irrelevant considerations as though they mattered. That is the ancient logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi – the fundamental fallacy of ignorance of the appropriate manner of conducting an enquiry: for, in the Aristotelian canon, a discussion of this kind is an enquiry intended to elucidate the truth, not a mere assertion of a priori opinions hedged about with fallacies.

Tom P then perpetrates a second and still more jarring instance of ignoratio elenchi by introducing to this straightforwardly mathematical enquiry a howling irrelevance in the shape of a half-baked discussion of a statement I had made about Al Gore’s misleading assertion that a paper on polar bears (Monnett & Gleason, 2006) had said the bears (all four of them, though Gore somehow did not mention that) had died because they had swum 60 miles to find ice in the Beaufort Sea. I correctly pointed out, in that part of the clip that Tom P carefully failed to cite, that the paper had stated the bears had been swamped by high winds and waves in a storm. Indeed, the passage that Tom P. cites from the paper explicitly states that the bears in question did not die because they had to swim long distances. The map that accompanies the Monnett & Gleason paper makes it plain that three of the four bears were in fact very close to the shore and would not have had to swim 60 miles in any event. A subsequent paper has established that polar bears are capable of swimming distances considerably in excess of 60 miles without difficulty. And, to cap it all, as I pointed out in another part of the clip that Tom P. decided to censor, the extent of sea ice in the Beaufort Sea, where the four bears died in the storm, had not declined at all in the dozen years preceding the making of Gore’s mawkish, sci-fi comedy-horror movie. Every aspect of Gore’s story was, as I said it was, fiction. Monnett & Gleason – in a passage for which they were later criticized and investigated – suggested that one day polar bears might drown if there was not enough ice (this type of unsubstantiated, speculative clause-de-style has become depressingly common among those who want to get their papers past editors who reject skeptical papers a priori), but the authors had explicitly stated that the bears Gore said had drowned swimming 60 miles to find the ice had in fact been swamped by high winds and high seas in an Arctic storm – an event not dissimilar to the recent storm that has greatly reduced the extent of sea ice as the summer minimum approaches.

I see that another cravenly anonymous contributor, “Matt”, has resorted to a snide ad-hominem remark about whether I am regarded as notable in Britain (well, der Prophet gilt nichts im Vaterland). Matt’s remark, too, is an irrelevance, and is a further instance of ignoratio elenchi. I am not sure why the moderators allowed it. It is worth pointing out that the chief reason why the climate extremists have so comprehensively lost the scientific argument is that they resort with such unbecoming frequency to egregious logical fallacies which, in any previous generation, would have been laughed at. It must surely have become apparent to “Matt” that his childish interposition of ad-hominem irrelevancies into a serious scientific discussion is unlikely to commend his or her argument (if there is one) to the readers of this column.

Finally, Mr. House makes the common error of assuming – or at any rate stating – that greenhouse warming and negative temperature feedback are incompatible. Not so: in the absence of feedbacks, as explained in the annex, the climate-sensitivity parameter (in the IPCC’s understanding) is 0.31 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, from which it follows that a somewhat negative feedback, giving a parameter of, say, 0.27, would still cause 1 K (2 F) warming at equilibrium in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Furthermore, because the curve of climate sensitivity against the feedback closed-loop gain gamma exhibits a near-zero slope over the negative-feedback interval gamma on [0, 1], even at a zero loop gain – implying strongly negative feedbacks – almost 0.5 K of CO2-driven warming would be expected.

On a similar point, Chris Y makes a common error that I myself once made: he assumes that the climate-sensitivity parameter is determined from surface temperature and radiative flux. In fact, it is conventionally determined by reference to incoming radiation at the characteristic-emission altitude, about 5 miles up in the mid-troposphere. That altitude varies inversely with latitude, but it is defined as the altitude at which incoming and outgoing radiative fluxes balance. The incoming flux is known by direct measurement via satellite to be 1362 W/m2, which must be divided by 4 to allow for the ratio of the surface area of a disk to a sphere, and must also be reduced to allow for the Earth’s reflectance or albedo, giving about 238 Watts per square meter. From the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, the emission temperature (assuming emissivity is unity, from which assumption no great error arises) is 254 K; and a little simple differential calculus tells us that, to a first approximation, the instantaneous or Planck sensitivity parameter (the first differential of the equation) is 254 / (4 * 238) = 0.267 K/W/m2. However, to allow for the non-uniform latitudinal distribution of mean temperatures in the mid-troposphere, this value should be increased by approximately one-sixth to the IPCC’s 0.31 K/W/m2. I have verified this value using 30 years of satellite temperature-anomaly data for the mid-troposphere at all latitudes, kindly supplied by Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Some authorities say that the radiation should be taken at the characteristic-emission level and the temperature taken at the Earth’s surface: if so, according to my model, on surface data supplied by Dr. Christy, the value of the instantaneous sensitivity parameter rises to 0.33 K/W/m2.

I am genuinely interested, as always, in considering serious scientific arguments that either underline or undermine my analysis. Either way, science advances. Warmest thanks to everyone for their interest, and to the patient and diligent moderators for facilitating a high standard of discussion.

Chuckle. But you know that. My entire participation (such as it is) in Global Climate or Climate Change or whatever one would like to call it is an utterly unfunded, unproductive hobby…
_________________
Sleepalot provided this graph I do not know if the data collected would be of use.

The problem that I see is that Monckton’s stooping to use their own points gives some level of credibility to the incredible. ….
____________________________
To us maybe but we are not his real audience it is the fence sitters and wobblers.

as Monckton said

…My own approach is to take the data and the IPCC’s arguments, put them together, draw logical conclusions using simple mathematical methods, and demonstrate that, even if the premises of their arguments is correct, their conclusion does not follow. This is a very powerful technique, known to the ancient Greeks as elenchus – arguing as far as possible on the opponent’s own ground, and showing him that even on his own terms he is not correct.

And he is correct.

The biggest weakness in the IPCC’s whole argument is the positive feed of water vapour back multiplying the effect of an increase in CO2 by a factor of three to four.

The temperature difference, 1.56K, used in that expression includes the necessary recognition of the lack of equilibrium (between average global temperature and atmospheric CO2) in 2000 with CO2 at 368ppmv (hence the expression “0.6 K is stated to be in the pipeline” used by Monckton), but there is no such recognition of a similar lack of equilibrium for the condition in 2100 with CO2 at 713ppmv, where a similar “in the pipeline” discrepancy due to lack of equilibrium will also exist and also needs to be taken into account.
The “in the pipeline” further increase in temperature that will similarly exist in 2100 due to this disequilibrium is likely to be greater than the 0.6K used by Monckton for 2000, since the ratio of CO2 concentrations between 2100 and 2000, (ie 713/368 = 1.9375) used in the calculation is greater than that between 1900 and 2000, (ie 368/296 = 1.243), 296ppmv being the CO2 concentration in 1900. Those latter figures can only give a rough indication, but what they show is atmospheric CO2 rising proportionally more rapidly in the 21st century than in the 20th, hence a greater “in the pipeline” figure is to be expected.
If the “in the pipeline” discrepancy in 2100 used in the calculation were 1.1K, (rather than being omitted altogether by Monckton), then the climate sensitivity would be 0.75K per W/M^2, in line with the IPCC , [since (1.56+1.1)/[5.35 ln(713/368)] = 0.75]

chris y you write “I assume a blackbody radiator as the starting point. P = 5.67E-8 * T^4. Increasing T from 288 to 289 K requires about 5.5 W/m^2 of additional incoming intensity. That gives about 0.2 C per W/m^2 for sensitivity. At warmer temperatures it is lower, cooler temperatures it is higher.”

This estimation assumes that the “structure of the atmosphere does not change”.. That is the lapse rate does not change. The lapse rate is not a feedback; it is an alternate way in which the radiation balance can be restored. So the no-feedback climate sensitivity that you have estimated is not correct. I have tried to find someone to try this argument out on. Are you prepared to discuss it with me?

He has assumed that the ratio of 0.7 that was derived for 1900-2100 applies to the period up till now. If you look more closely at the IPCC numbers, the ratio till present is nearer 1.0 because aerosol effects have mostly canceled the non-CO2 warming effects, leaving the effect as equivalent to CO2 alone. This cancellation is easily seen from the IPCC forcings to date. Later the aerosol growth is not expected to be so fast because of its limited lifetime in the atmosphere, so the forcing change starts to be dominated by the accumulating GHGs of which CO2 may be more than half.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 31, 2012 at 3:55 pm:
“Finally, Mr. House makes the common error of assuming – or at any rate stating – that greenhouse warming and negative temperature feedback are incompatible. Not so: in the absence of feedbacks, as explained in the annex, the climate-sensitivity parameter (in the IPCC’s understanding) is 0.31 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, from which it follows that a somewhat negative feedback, giving a parameter of, say, 0.27, would still cause 1 K (2 F) warming at equilibrium in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration.”
========================================================

Christopher, “a somewhat negative feedback…would still cause…warming”, right, no problem with that, but only if this negative feedback were possible.

Now, assuming that a negative feedback is possible does not refute my point that a negative feedback is impossible. It is a pure matter of logic. It essentially goes like that: – GH: “A negative feedback is impossible, because…” – MoB: “I assume a negative feedback is possible”.

I am sorry, but your assumption-argument misses the point. It is OK if you possibly test something on this blog, but the notion about a “negative feedback” is not good.

And as a by-product of this little constructive debate we can see that the strategy “there is greenhouse gases warming but there are no positive feedbacks” is not good. I can go deeper into details, if you like.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 31, 2012 at 7:59 am
“Henry Clark says that there was only 0.3 K warming from the 1930s to the present, so I ought not to have calculated that there was 0.4 K warming in the 49 year 1960-2008. However, I have merely followed the data. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the HadCRUt3 data over the period is 0.66 K”

HADCRUT3 is fudged data. CRU “data” (and the other dataset also adjusted by CAGW movement proponents: GISS) does not match reality seen outside of politically correct historical revisionism. See, for example:

For a simple illustration of the standard tactic, these guys were sloppy enough to leave an electronic trail where, for instance, http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/fig1x.gif shows the 5-year mean of U.S. temperature in the high point of the 1980s was 0.4 degrees Celsius cooler than such in the 1930s, but, in utter contradiction, later they realized next to nobody pays enough attention to quantitatively reading graphs so they could get away with the fudging in http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif making the same less than 0.1 degrees Celsius apart instead.

Hansen (GISS) is an extremist activist protester repeatedly arrested. His ally of Mann has outright stated his admiration of Ehrlich. And CRU (source of HADCRUT) is infamous for climategate.

Yet all one has to do to for such to break down is go outside where enviro-activists are dominant, a locale bounded in time and in space: As illustrated in my last comment, pre-1980s sources countradict the revisionism and so do later ones from authors in Russia (plus some within the Anglosphere but with honest objective individuals less inclined to try entering the field at this point).

You already know untrue claims are common but may not want to try to delve into multiple matters at once. However, this is one of those most important, and even skeptics too often fall into implicitly treating untrue but highly publicized revisionism as if accurate, without a word of question.

Though having repeatedly been warned against the folly of it, Lord Monckton continues to claim that there is, in nature, the constant that he and others call “the climate sensitivity” (aka “the equilibrium climate sensitivity.”) The climate sensitivity is the proportionality constant in a purported linear mapping from increases in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration to increases in the spatially averaged equilibrium surface air temperature at Earth’s surface. As the equilibrium temperature is non-observable, the conjecture that there is in nature this mapping will forever remain untestable and thus unscientific.

“Slioch” says that if I had added the IPCC’s 0.6 K warming in the pipeline at 2000 to the CO2-driven of 1.56 K 21st-century CO2-driven warming that is the IPCC’s implicit central estimate I should have derived a centennial-scale climate sensitivity parameter of 0,75 rather than 0.44 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. It was precisely to forestall errors such as Slioch’s that I provided, in the Annex, a list of various values for the climate-sensitivity parameter, including the equilibrium value, which, at 0.88 K/W/m2, is scarcely greater than that chosen by Slioch as his favored centennial parameter. He says this is “in line with IPCC”, but does not state any precise, quantitatie reference for his assertion. His approach would imply that very nearly all temperature feedbacks had already acted, and that is contrary to the literature – the lead author of the IPCC’s 2007 report, in a paper published in 2009, said that equilibrium would not be reached for 1000-3000 years. Furthermore, he has mixed apples with pears – delicious, but inappropriate. My determination of the IPCC’s implicit centennial value 0.44 K/W/m2 for the 21st-century climate sensitivity parameter was derived from CO2 forcings alone, but the IPCC’s 0.6 K warming in the pipeline is, of course, from all anthropogenic sources. Slioch has also double-counted the warming in the pipeline, putting both the 0.6 K pre-2000 pipeline warming and his assumed 0.5 K 21st-century 21st-century pipeline warming into the 21st century. Also, from the fact that the IPCC’s implicit estimates of centennial warming and bicentennial warming are 0.44 and 0.5 K respectively, one should deduce that the absurdly rapid growth in the climate-sensitivity parameter from the instantaneous or unperturbed 0,31 to his suggested 0.75 K/”/m2 in little more than a century is implausible, to say the least. Besides, if my reasoning in the present paper is correct, the true climate-sensitivity parameter for 1960-2008 is 0.27 K/W/m2, there would be cooling, not warming, in the pipeline at 2000, and the paper does state explicitly that if the key result is correct there was no in-the-pipeline warming at 2000. The best way to get a feel for the IPCC’s various values of the climate-sensitivity parameter over time is to have a look at the values I have derived and listed in the Annex. The IPCC’s assumption that half of the warming that it wishes should have arisen as a result of our sins of emission before 2000 has not arisen is based on its assumption that the centennial-scale sensitivity parameter, at 0.44 K/W/m2, is half of its assumed equilibrium parameter, which is 0.88 K/W/m2. But, since equilibrium will not occur for 1000-3000 years, as noted above, even if it were appropriate for the IPCC to assume that 0.6 K of warming was already in the pipeline it would certainly not be appropriate to put more than half of that into the 21st-century calculation.

“Jim D” says I have “assumed” that the IPCC’s implicit fraction of total anthropogenic warming contributed by CO2 is 0.7. I have not “assumed” it: I have determined it by calculation. See Table 0 in the Annex. It is exasperating that the IPCC makes so few of these essential quantities explicit – it is almost as though they were doing their very best to prevent anyone from checking their methods and results. However, in the 2001 report they do state that the CO2 fraction is approximately the value I have had to calculate from Table SPM.3 and Figure 10.26 of the 2007 report, to ensure that they currently adhere to their 2001 value, which of course takes into account the effect of negative anthropogenic forcings such as particulate aerosols (which the IPCC cannot measure and has, therefore, adopted as a convenient fudge-factor allowing it to pretend that climate sensitivity is a great deal higher than it is).

Mr. House, having realized that he had been incorrect in assuming that net-negative feedbacks and global warming could not co-exist, shifts his ground in a tiresomely characteristic fashion and tries to maintain that there is no such thing as a negative feedback in the first place. I have much sympathy with Dr. Courtney’s trenchant and apposite remark to the effect that Mr. House ought to go away and learn at least the basics of climate sensitivity theory before he makes stuff like this up. Mr. House might usefully begin his reading with Bode’s 1945 book on feedback amplification in electronic circuits – for it is from process engineering that the feedback methodology now used by climatologists is derived. He may also like to read Hansen (1984), which, though full of elementary mistakes that ought not to have passed peer review, does give quite a clear account of how feedback amplification is thought to apply to the climate. There is also a splendid pedagogical paper by Professor Lindzen’s former student Gerard Roe (2009), which gives a fascinating account of the moment at which the concept of negative feedbacks was discovered, and goes on to give an excellent, lucid explanation of how feedback theory is applied to the climate. Dr. Courtney is right: Mr. House would do well not to try to intervene further in discussions at this scientific level until he has familiarized himself at least with the basic literature. From my own examination of this question, I conclude either that the feedback model, though certainly appropriate to electronic circuitry, may not be appropriate when considering the climate, or that climate feedbacks must be either net-negative or, at worst, barely positive rather than, as the IPCC assumes, very strongly positive. A homeostatic model seems more appropriate than a feedback model, given the nature of the atmosphere’s upper and lower boundaries and the remarkable near-invariance of surface temperatures over the past 64 million years. Finally on this point, I must apologize for an error in my earlier answer to Mr. House. I had stated that the relevant interval of loop gains covering negative feedbacks was [0, 1], when I had of course intended to write [-1, 0).

Henry Clark rightly points out that the HadCRUt3 temperature record, like so many of them, has been tampered with to steepen the apparent slope of warming over the 20th century. However, rather than trying to substitute my own judgment for that of the soi-disant experts, I have preferred simply to accept their data as is (sed solum ad argumentum), because, even if one accepts it as is, the conclusions that the usual suspects attempt to draw from it are manifestly inappropriate. By accepting their premises for the sake of argument, I remove a big bone of contention from the discussion and force them to examine the inconsistencies between their premises and the inappropriate conclusion of high climate sensitivity that they draw from them.

Mr. Brooks says he can understand “Tamino” (whoever that may be) but is baffled by me. I do regret that in my attempt to be very brief I have not been as clear as I usually try to be, and one or two of the scientists who have kindly read my argument have made the same criticism. Others, on the other hand, have found the paper clear: but they are climatologists and are familiar with the actually rather elementary concepts that I am discussing here.

Mr. Oldberg says I ought not to mention equilibrium climate sensitivity because it will not occur for thousands of years and – as a hypothesis – is not testable today. I mentioned equilibrium climate sensitivity only in passing, to assist readers in grasping the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of the IPCC’s shorter-term climate-sensitivity parameters. And it was the shorter-term parameters that I used as the benchmark for my calculations. These parameters are testable, and the present paper provides one method of testing them. In any event, Mr. Oldberg should learn to apply logical techniques with due care; merely because a quantity cannot yet be determined, one should not – as he does – go on to argue that the phenomenon that the quantity is intended to measure does not exist. If he really wants to persist in arguing that there is no such thing as equilibrium climate sensitivity, he should take the matter up with the IPCC, not with me. Since they use it, and provide an implicit value for it, i am entitled to provide evidence that their value is greatly overstated.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. As a concept, the “climate sensitivity” (CS) has the shortcoming of being defined on an equilibrium temperature. This temperature is not an example of an observable.. As we cannot observe it, when the IPCC, you or anyone else claims a numerical value for the CS, this claim is insusceptible to being refuted. As it is insusceptible to being refuted, this claim is not “scientific.”

The central flaw in the IPCC’s argument for CAGW is not that the IPCC assigns too high of a numerical value to the CS but rather that the CS is not a scientific concept. In representing that its conclusion is a consequence of a scientific inquiry, the IPCC has lied. .

His Lordship persists in his errors. He continues to insist that his analysis of climate sensitivity via emissions per increase in CO2 concentration is useful. It is not.

His analysis finds the mean emissions/concentration-growth ratio, which is equal to the sum of emissions/sum concentration-growth. He total emissions by this number. The result is of course the total emissions.

Estimating sensitivity via emissions is detour. it serves no purpose except to confound the gullible. It would be as useful, and easy, to include the price of lemons in the analysis.

His second error is to presume that because he declares that “If feedbacks operating over the short to medium term are indeed net-negative, there is no warming in the pipeline from past emissions” there is not warming in the pipeline. First, supposing feedbacks to be net-negative does not make them so. Second, feedbacks are not the only issue relevant to warming in the pipeline. The other is thermal inertia. As there are element of the climate system, such as the ocean, that have considerable thermal inertia, there will be delayed warming whatever the feedback.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 1, 2012 at 12:40 am“Henry Clark rightly points out that the HadCRUt3 temperature record, like so many of them, has been tampered with to steepen the apparent slope of warming over the 20th century. However, rather than trying to substitute my own judgment for that of the soi-disant experts, I have preferred simply to accept their data as is (sed solum ad argumentum), because, even if one accepts it as is, the conclusions that the usual suspects attempt to draw from it are manifestly inappropriate. By accepting their premises for the sake of argument, I remove a big bone of contention from the discussion and force them to examine the inconsistencies between their premises and the inappropriate conclusion of high climate sensitivity that they draw from them.”

Fair enough. Most of all, I just wanted to make sure you were fully aware,* as I know you are one of the more major public figures on the skeptic side. Thank you for the reply.

Although I think presentation of CRU data could best come with a brief note about how the reader should not assume it is accurate, I understand the practicality of focusing on one (other) topic at a time sometimes.

———————

* Really there needs to be an equally convenient online dataset of tabular values (as well as graphs) for global average temperature all the way back to the 19th century for sources unlikely to be biased, not just NH or SH data alone having to be manually combined, since often another factor in even skeptics predominately using CRU/GISS-source data is that others are less convenient. For instance, even woodfortrees.org does not have such now. Perhaps I’ll try to create such myself sometime, using graph-to-data digitizing software if necessary.

““Slioch” says that if I had added the IPCC’s 0.6 K warming in the pipeline at 2000 to the CO2-driven of 1.56 K 21st-century CO2-driven warming that is the IPCC’s implicit central estimate I should have derived a centennial-scale climate sensitivity parameter of 0,75 rather than 0.44 Kelvin per Watt per square meter.”

No, I made no such statement, and nor is it true. Nor was there any “double counting” on my part.

My main point was that, since Monckton took account of a (not yet seen) warming of 0.6K “in the pipeline” in 2000, then he should also have taken account of a similar figure in 2100, but did not do so. He still has not done so.

The last sentence of my previous post was conditional and illustrative. It showed that if Monckton had included an “in the pipeline” figure of 1.1K at 2100 (as well as the 0.6K figure in 2000), then he would have derived the 0.75K per W/m^2 climate sensitivity figure.

[I don’t know what the “in the pipeline” figure will be in 2100, and neither does Monckton or anyone else, but it is reasonable to suggest that it will be greater than the 0.6K 2000 figure since the proportionate rise in CO2 in the 21st century (according to Monckton’s figures) is greater than in the 20th.]

Wonders will never cease! Even the obstinate “there must be some warming due to CO2″ Lord Monckton is shifting closer to agreeing with ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon.’ The death of the greenhouse gas effect is just taking a little longer to be absorbed in some quarters. Perhaps Mr Watts should entertain a post on the issue?

REPLY: You know my position on “Slaying the Sky Dragon”, I don’t see anything here that would change that. – Anthony

This is a brief reply to thank you for your post at August 31, 2012 at 4:09 pm which attempts to help me. I do not want to deflect this thread from its valuable subject but I give a brief outline of the experiment to display my gratitude for your attempt to help.

Simply, the experiment obtains the information of your graph and also (importantly) uses sensors mounted on the tether of a balloon to monitor at 10 m increments of altitude (a) the 15 micron IR flux in both vertical directions and (b) air temperature. The (near) simultaneous readings for (i) with solar and (ii) without solar radiation enable deconvolution of the effects of solar input and so reveal the variation of the IR effective emission height with varying backscattered IR from the surface. Hence, the effects of temperature on the emission height can be determined empirically. Knowing that, then the effects of GHG concentration can be calculated for constant temperature. And, therefore, anticipated variations to the lapse rate can be estimated for changes to GHG concentrations.

Monckton in his reply earlier today pointedly failed to address a fundamental flaw in his calculations: he has ignored the fact that while total human emissions and atmospheric concentration of CO2 have a linear relationship, it does not go through the origin.

Mr., Telford says I persist in what he calls my “errors”: but, on reading his posting, I find it hard to determine whether he is deliberately trying to confuse the issue (which will fail: I shall only withhold wide publication of this result if proper scientific arguments against it are adduced), or is ignorant of elementary mathematics, or is simply confused himself.

It may be the inadequacies of the blog software, which is notoriously incapable of representing equations correctly, but the equation Mr. Telford produces is manifestly erroneous, in that – as it appears on my screen, at any rate – he equates the 67 ppmv growth in CO2 emissions over the period 1960-2008 with its reciprocal, as can be seen if the term for the sum of emissions on the l.h.s. is cancelled from the numerator and denominator.

He compounds this very silly mistake by asserting, quite wrongly, that I had derived the total emissions over the period of study from a half-baked equation such as his. Of course, I had done no such thing: as the paper itself rather plainly states, the method and data from which the value was compiled are given in the Annex: the value is the simple sum of the annual global emissions. In short, Mr. Telford has assumed I had argued in a direction that he thought he could dismiss out of hand, when in fact I have argued – as I usually try to do, in altogether the opposite direction: i.e. from the real-world data to the conclusion, and not the other way about.

Slioch’s attempt at partial rebuttal of my careful, detailed, point-by-point refutation of his attempt to suggest that I had incorrectly determined the centennial-scale climate-sensitivity parameter implicit in the IPCC’s projections estimates of climate sensitivity during the 21st century is plainly a further attempt merely to confuse matters. I refer readers to my earlier posting that details his multitude of errors.

John O’Sullivan intervenes with a pointless, off-topic and characteristically intellectually dishonest attempt to state that my paper appears to be moving close to his scientifically-illiterate proposition – with which he knows perfectly well I disagree – that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect. Mr. Watts correctly points out that nothing in my paper lends the slightest support to any such infantile proposition.

Finally, “Tom P”, either through ignorance or through a deliberate attempt to confuse, moans that the least-squares regression trend on the annual ratios of global CO2 emissions to CO2 concentration increase does not pass through the origin of my graph. Of course it does not pass through the origin, because the y-intercept (the point on the line at which it intersects the y axis) has a value 15.25 Gte CO2. That rather substantial value being rather substantially different from zero, the regression trend-line could not possibly pass through the origin, now, could it? If only “Tom P.” would accept Dr. Courtney’s point that when dealing with a straight line one does not need to resort to infinitesimal calculus and that consequently there is no requirement whatsoever for a constant of integration, he would begin to grasp just how basic his errors are.

Let me make it very plain once again to those who, by various dubious methods, are trying to derail this thread or confuse the issue deliberately. Such techniques will no longer work, if they ever did. This little paper of mine is being widely circulated among the scientific community and, if there is anything truly wrong with it, whether conceptually or mathematically, someone will no doubt get in touch and let me know. I shall then add a posting here to record any real errors that are found. So far, though, the contributions from the climate-extremist camp have been painfully inadequate – an inadequacy, one suspects, that is born of sheer desperation.

Now hear this. From here on, do science, not politics, and do not sully science with willful or ignorant attempts at diversion. The result described in my short and not particularly complicated paper is respectable, as far as I or anyone else who has seen it so far can see. Please, please, produce proper, serious arguments against it, or go and play in somebody else’s sandbox. The time for intellectual dishonesty is over.

Your figure 1 represents the slope of the relationship (dE/dt)/(dC/dt), and then wrongly uses just the slope to relate emissions to concentration – you need the intercept as well.

Your error is precisely equivalent to solving the equation dC/dt = k dE/dt as C= k E rather than C = k E + Co and forgetting the constant of integration, Co (the CO2 concentration of about 300 ppm before there was any appreciable human emissions).

There is not a “quantum of CO2 emissions” necessary to raise the temperature by 1 K, any more than there is a quantum of CO2 concentration that would warm by 1 K. As should be clear from your equation 1, it is a ratio between two concentrations that determines the warming: an extra 10 ppm produces a different temperature rise if added to 300ppm or 400 ppm.

Hence it is necessary to know the total emissions at both 1960 and 2008 to calculate the rise in temperature, not only the increase in this period, just as you required the concentration at those two dates and not just the increase in equation 1. You will then find you get exactly the same answer for warming using either concentration or emissions, and your “independent constraint” from your calculation becomes evident as just being a result of your faulty analysis.

I don’t know who you might have already seen your draft of this paper, but I would advise you to ask them to take another look if you can’t grasp the error yourself.

Greg House says:
The concept of “greenhouse gases warming” excludes a negative feedback. You can not have both at the same time.

If the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” is correct, then you generally must have more warming if you have more “greenhouse gases” (until the effect is saturated). If warming increases concentration of water vapour in the air and water vapour is a “greenhouse gas”, then you will inevitably get more warming, this is a positive feedback.

Logically, if there is a proven negative feedback, then it proves the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” to be false. But, as I said, you can not have both at the same time.
===============================

The above doesn’t make any sense at all. It belongs in the “not-even-wrong” category. A negative feedback does not become impossible because of the existence of the underlying process to which it is a response (in this case warming). On the contrary, the negative feedback — it if exists — does so precisely as a consequence of the underlying process.

What you are saying is equivalent to claiming that sweating (a negative feedback for thermoregulation of the body) cannot possibly exist if your body heats up. Or a million similar examples.

Sweating occurs precisely as a consequence of your body heating up. And it is a negative feedback because it cools you.

Examples of plausible negative feedbacks to green house warming can be easily conceived. The most obvious one, for us climate amateurs, would be an increase in cloud formation, blocking more sun.

The fact that the surface temperature of the planet has stayed within about 12 degrees C for what looks like an eternity, strongly suggests there must be some serious negative feedbacks at work.

And of course, pretty much all the feedbacks we observe in nature are negative.

Christopher Monckton continues to fail to address the error in his essay, to which I alluded earlier, which led him to “incorrectly determine[d] the centennial-scale climate-sensitivity parameter”.
The error (of omission) is contained within this paragraph in the Introduction from Monckton,

“Projected 21st-century anthropogenic warming, as the mean of values on all six IPCC emissions scenarios, is 2.8 K (IPCC, 2007, table SPM.3: Annex, Table 0). Of this, 0.6 K is stated to be in the pipeline. Of the remaining 2.2 K, some 0.65 K is attributable to non-CO2 forcings, since the CO2 fraction of anthropogenic warming is 71% (the Annex explains the derivation). Thus the IPCC’s current implicit central estimate of the warming by 2100 that will be attributable solely to the CO2 we emit this century is only 1.56 K.”

Monckton calculates the figure 1.56K, (upon which the calculation of climate sensitivity is based), by (inter alia) subtracting from the 2.8K 21st century IPCC warming the figure 0.6K, which figure is the, as yet unrealised, warming still “in the pipeline” as of the year 2000. That subtraction is entirely appropriate. HOWEVER, having subtracted that “in the pipeline” figure from the beginning of the period 2000 to 2100, it is then necessary to ADD a corresponding “in the pipeline” figure for the year 2100. This Monckton omits to do and therein lies the error to which I alluded earlier.

I went on to point out that the “in the pipeline” figure for 2100 was likely to be greater than that for 2000, since the proportionate increase in CO2 in the 21st century in Monckton’s calculation is greater than that for the 20th century. Hence the resulting temperature increase figure for use in the subsequent calculation would be greater than 1.56K and the calculated climate sensitivity then would be also proportionately larger.

I would be grateful, at the third time of asking, if Christopher could address these points.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 1, 2012 at 12:40 am:
Mr. House, having realized that he had been incorrect in assuming that net-negative feedbacks and global warming could not co-exist, shifts his ground in a tiresomely characteristic fashion and tries to maintain that there is no such thing as a negative feedback in the first place.
=================================================

No, this is not true, I did not realize that nor I maintained that other thing.

But OK, maybe I did not expressed my point clear enough, no problem, let me make it again.

The “greenhouse gases warming” notion alone supposes only a positive feedback. Since water vapour is considered to be a “greenhouse gas” too and “CO2 induced warming” causes more evaporation, you will have more warming until the effect is saturated, this is a positive feedback.

Now, if you maintain that a negative feedback is possible, you need to prove that the “greenhouse gases warming” triggers certain mechanism that itself contributes to cooling, then it would be possible to get a decrease in warming or even cooling as a net result.

Did you demonstrate that such a mechanism exists? No, you did not, neither in your guest post nor in your comments on this thread.

Hence your conclusion is not supported by your argumentation and is therefore baseless.

At the same time, it is generally possible to assume that a negative feedback exists, as long as no one proved the opposite, but you failed to prove that this assumption is correct.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 31, 2012 at 7:59 am
… My own approach is to take the data and the IPCC’s arguments, put them together, draw logical conclusions using simple mathematical methods, and demonstrate that, even if the premises of their arguments is correct, their conclusion does not follow. This is a very powerful technique, known to the ancient Greeks as elenchus – arguing as far as possible on the opponent’s own ground, and showing him that even on his own terms he is not correct.
===============================================================
The Hockey Stick planted in Yamal is coming down one chop at a time …

Paolo says:
September 1, 2012 at 6:11 am:
“The above doesn’t make any sense at all. It belongs in the “not-even-wrong” category. A negative feedback does not become impossible because of the existence of the underlying process to which it is a response (in this case warming). On the contrary, the negative feedback — it if exists — does so precisely as a consequence of the underlying process.”
==================================================

I think there is some misunderstanding here. I already answered that in my comment at 7:15 am.

This is a futile exercise because climate sensitivity is zero. It follows from Ferenc Miskolczi’s work on the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. He showed theoretically in 2005 that for a stable climate to exist the infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has to have a value of 1.87. This is maintained by feedbacks among the greenhouse gases present. For practical purposes it boils down to carbon dioxide and water vapor. Carbon dioxide can not be changed but water vapor has an essentially infinite supply/sink in the oceans and can vary as needed. This was theory but in 2010 he was able to put it to an experimental test [E&E 21(4):243-262 (2010)]. Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he showed that the infrared transparency of the atmosphere was constant and had not changed for 61 years. At the same time the amount of carbon dioxide in air increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of substantial amount of carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. It follows that the output of climate models using the greenhouse effect to predict warming are completely invalid and emission control laws based upon these predictions are built on false premises and should be voided. If you wonder why the added carbon dioxide did not absorb IR, this is not what happened. It did absorb but water vapor adjusted itself to neutralize that absorption. This is called negative feedback. It is the exact opposite of positive feedback, an ad hoc addition to the greenhouse theory devised by IPCC for the purpose of increasing the warming you get from carbon dioxide. And since the addition of carbon dioxide to air does not result in a temperature increase the so-called “sensitivity” becomes zero.

In practise, we would not expect CO2 to increase on its own if there were no human emissions so we can probably just discard the “constant”. In fact, in the absence of human emissions, the constant would become -2.6 ppm because the natural sources are now a big sink rather than a positive 0.1 ppm. So, what constant are you going to use.

In reality, it is just a fluke that we can arrive at only 49.22% of human emissions remaining in the air. Last year, natural sinks absorbed 66% of human emissions. It is more that human emissions have been increasing at a certain rate over time which just happens to be very close to the rate at which natural sinks are sinking the excess CO2 in the atmosphere above the equlibrium level of about 270 to 280 ppm.

Over time, the natural sinks ability to absorb CO2 has been rising. Before the 1900, the natural sinks increased and decreased by orders of magnitude more than human emissions were increasing. Starting in about 1900, the natural sinks have become mostly positive and the rate at which they are absorbing CO2 has been increasing. It has risen to about 2.0% per year of the Excess CO2 which is in the atmosphere. We might expect this rate to actually continue increasing going by the history since humans began adding CO2.

I agree with slioch here. If you take that the amount in the pipeline in 2000 is the same as that in 2100, you can’t subtract it from the 2.8 K rise which happens despite the changes in the pipeline. In fact, the amount at 2100 may be greater. Taking 0.6 K off is assuming everything now in the pipeline contributed to the 2.8 K, while none was left in the pipeline at the end. If any was left at the end, you can’t say it contributed to the warming.
Also the conversion to Gt CO2 per K is suspect, because we know that decreases inversely with the ppm over time due to the log function. So this parameter has twice the value in 2100 compared to now, for example, and a 21st century average is an overestimate for 1960-2008. The early addition of a given amount of CO2 is much more effective than the later addition of the same amount by this log law.
As I mentioned earlier, the aerosol change in 1960-2008 is also much larger than expected in the average of the 1900-2100 period, so that suppressed the initial temperature change too.

Monckton’s equation 1 requires the absolute CO2 concentration, not the increase in concentration of your equation. The relevant equation relating concentration, C, to total human emissions, E, is therefore:

C = k E + Co (2)

Co is about 290 ppm, and k is the reciprocal of the slope of the plot http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/emissionsvsconc.png/ or equivalently the reciprocal of the intercept of plot of Monckton’s fig. 1, both giving around 15 GTonnesCO2/ppm. Rewriting Monkton’s equation 1 in terms of emissions using equation 2 above allows the temperature increase for any period to be derived by plugging in the cumulative human emissions up to the start and the end of the period.

The excellent agreement of the data to the linear fit of equation 2 ensures that you get the same warming whether cumulative emissions or concentration values are used, and Monckton’s thesis of an independent constraint based on emissions completely unravels.

That straight-line between cumulative human emissions and the current CO2 concentration is also very strong evidence that human emissions are indeed responsible for the increase of CO2 over the last couple of centuries.

And it’s worth noting that the relevant quantity is cumulative human emissions to date, rather than emissions in any one year: even if we could cut total human emissions to zero, it would take a considerable time, many decades to centuries, before CO2 levels dropped appreciably.

For those more familiar with money than climate, the pipeline can be seen as a kind of escrow. If you need to pay $28k over a year and $6k are held in escrow going into the year, making the correct payments will lead to the same escrow at the end, but if you only pay $22k, you drain your escrow account. Monckton has assumed the warming is only 2.2 K, which makes the 21st century unbalanced on the budget books, not a sustainable situation going into the 22nd century.

Paolo says:
September 1, 2012 at 10:36 am:
“The concept of greenhouse warming does not exclude the presence or absence of feedbacks, either negative or positive.
Of course you can consider greenhouse warming by itself, ceteris paribus, and therefore without any feedbacks.”
==============================================
That is exactly what I am doing, considering “greenhouse gases warming” by itself, and by itself it excludes a negative feedback and includes a positive feedback.

Again, since water vapour is considered to be a “greenhouse gas” too and “CO2 induced warming” causes more evaporation, you will have more warming until the effect is saturated, this is a positive feedback.

So if you accept the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” you have already accepted a positive feedback. Skeptics need to realise that. A possible negative feedback still needs to be proven and Christopher failed to do that on this thread.

Sure, but my responses to your posts will take time. As to your last comment, the blackbody radiator starting point assumes nothing about the existence of an atmosphere. It is a lousy approximation to the Earth. It depends on what temperature you assume for the emission surface of the body. If you assume 254 K, then the sensitivity is something like 0.27 K per W/m^2, as Lord Monckton pointed out above. It says nothing about the source of the additional forcing.

However, it provides a starting point from which to determine if additional model complexity provides higher or lower sensitivity than an ideal blackbody.

I think we need to agree on this before going further. Let me know your thoughts.

Has his Lordship forgotten that the reciprocal of the reciprocal of x is x? Has he so honed his copious rhetorical skills that he has forgotten his school-boy maths?

May I respectfully suggest that he submits his analysis to a journal with an open peer review process, so we can all enjoy the drubbing it get when the manifest and manifold errors are exposed, and logic not rhetoric is required to rebut comments.

Alternatively, should the nameless scientists to whom his Lordship claims to have sent this analysis not recommend publication on account of its numerous flaws, I challenge him to post their conclusions here and as necessary, apologise to those of us who found these errors first.

His Lordship appears to have neglected to comment on the importance of thermal inertia in determining how much warming is in the pipeline. May we conclude that he conceeds this point?

REPLY: Thanks for pointing it out. I’ve yet to see one positive comment on this blog from the perennially dour Richard Telford, so in the spirit of this comment, I think I’ll refer to him in the future as “his Snideship” ;-) – Anthony

Greg House said, “So if you accept the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” you have already accepted a positive feedback. Skeptics need to realise that. A possible negative feedback still needs to be proven and Christopher failed to do that on this thread.”

The latent cooling of water is already a negative feed back. The change in lapse rate also a negative feed back. The problem with GHG forcing is that all GHGs are not created equally. Increased CO2 will cause the radiant spectrum that interacts with CO2 to radiant from a higher colder altitude. Water vapor has limits on its higher cooler sweet spot. If one degree of surface warming increases evaporation by 4% as I believe is estimated, then is is not whether CO2 is saturated but if H2O is saturated that matters. So you really have two effective radiant layers, CO2 which would be uniformly distributed and H2O which would be highly variable. Only where the two layers are complimentary would you have the maximum CO2 forcing impact. That leaves the oceans and the Antarctic out of the equation as far as optimum reinforcement of CO2 forcing is concerned. It’s a nonlinear thing, kinda like the data implies :).

You say: “…anybody who knows anything about the carbon cycle would “expect the CO2 to increase” or to decrease because it cannot be constant.”

In fact as Moncton’s fig. 1 or my plot shows, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is increasing in step with the human emissions. The amount of atmospheric CO2 will certainly will not be constant while we continue to produce so much from our activities.

Some further replies on scientific points. First, Tom P. continues to try to apply a constant of integration to a simple algebraic relationship. Dr. Courtney has already pointed out his error, but he persists in it. If his ratio (dE/dt) / (dC/dt) is an algebraic equation, as an earlier posting by him says it is, then one may cancel the dt’s: and there is certainly no need to invent a constant that is not stated in the equation itself.
Next, he suggests that I have only used the slope to relate emissions to concentration, when in fact the slope and intercept of the relation between emissions growth and concentration growth are both plainly stated on the graph itself and mentioned in my earlier reply on this point.
He is, of course, trivially correct that there is no constant quantum of CO2 emissions necessary to raise the temperature by 1 K; but over the period of study no significant error arises. He would have avoided the error of imagining that this consideration mattered if he had acted upon my earlier request that he should produce a quantitative rather than a qualitative argument. Consider the 69ppmv increase in CO concentration from 1960-2008. On the IPCC’s method, the warming that results is 0.44[5.35 ln(386/317)] = 0.46 K. Now take the 69 ppmv increase from 386 to 455 ppmv, which gets us well into the mid-21st century. The warming, even if we regard the climate sensitivity parameter as a constant, is 0.44[5.35 ln(455/386)] = 0.39 K. Allowing for the fact that the climate sensitivity parameter will be climbing slowly throughout the century, the two values will be even closer to one another than shown here. So Tom P. is complaining about a second-order effect that is scarcely likely to alter the final analysis to a significant degree.
The point is that the trend in the ratio of CO2 emissions growth to CO2 concentration growth; over the limited timescale of the present exercise the growth in the climate-sensitivity parameter will more or less countervail against the logarithmic attenuation of the CO2 forcing; and, therefore, my calculations remain in the right ballpark. If Tom P. thinks otherwise, then let him now clarify and demonstrate his argument with a properly-sourced, properly-presented, quantitative analysis like mine. When he has done that analysis, he will see that the error he unscientifically (and erroneously) sneers about in my paper does not in fact exist.
“Slioch”, before lecturing me about supposed errors, should take the trouble to review my sources, all of which I stated so that the references could easily be looked up. It is the IPCC which says that, of the 2.8 K 21st-century global warming it projects (as the average of all six emissions scenarios), 0.6 K is attributable to warming in the pipeline. The rest of the warming over the century is 2.2 K, of which all but 1.56 K is attributable to other anthropogenic influences. Accordingly, the warming we shall cause in this century as a result of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century is 1.56 K, according to the IPCC. If “Slioch” disagrees with this, let him take it up with the IPCC, not with me. In my very detailed reply to his first posting, very nearly all of which he appears not to have read, I made it quite plain that, since the IPCC’s equilibrium climate-sensitivity parameter is 0.88 K/W/m2, and since that equilibrium will not be reached for 1-3000 years, it is, to say the least, implausible that a parameter as high as 0.75 K/W/m2 could obtain in this century: and I note that he has failed to accede to my request that he provide a reference from the IPCC for his absurdly high value. So all of “Slioch’s” points were answered, and answered comprehensively, at the first time of asking. Let him reread my original answer with proper attention, and then go and look up the references. Then, at least, though he may be no wiser, he will at least be better informed.
“Jim D” agrees with “Slioch” that one should not deduct the 0.6 K warming in the pipeline from the 2.8 K warming it projects for the 21st century, but in doing so he disagrees with my stated source, the IPCC. Let him take up his disagreement with the IPCC, not with me. All I have done is to take the IPCC’s results and data as though they were normative and demonstrate that they have drawn illogical conclusions from them.
Mr. House states, meaninglessly, that “the greenhouse-gases warming notion alone supports only a positive feedback”. That is incorrect. The instantaneous or Planck climate-sensitivity parameter is determined under the assumption that no positive or negative feedbacks exist. Its value, as I have already explained in some detail in an earlier answer, is approximately 0.31 K/W/m2. One necessary mathematical reason why the Planck parameter is determined under the assumption that no feedbacks exist (or, equivalently, that if they do exist they sum to zero) is that not only the warming that arises from a forcing but also, et separatim, the warming that arises from the presence of feedbacks, is dependent upon that parameter. It is part of the reference-frame within which all climate-sensitivity calculations must take place. For these reasons, Mr. House’s assertion that anyone who assumes there is a greenhouse effect must also assume net-positive feedbacks is a grave misunderstanding of the elementary equations of climatological physics.
Mr. House goes on to say that I maintain a negative feedback is possible. I gave him three references establishing that negative feedbacks exist. He has not read them.
He then complains that I did not demonstrate that any negative feedback actually exists in the real climate, and does so immediately after mentioning one such negative feedback himself – evaporation. If he will read the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, or Soden and Held 2006, he will find various negative feedbacks discussed, such as the lapse-rate feedback. Once again, Dr. Courtney’s comment is apt: Mr. House simply does not know what he is talking about and, even when he is given the courtesy of detailed replies with references, he fails to read them. He should really leave this discussion now: he is not up to it.
Mr. Oldberg has also failed to read my earlier reply to him, though he mentions that he has seen it. My paper did not, repeat not, depend upon the equilibrium sensitivity parameter. However, given that the transient-sensitivity parameters that are falsifiable are falsified in my paper, it is legitimate to expect that, ceteris paribus, the IPCC may also have overstated the equilibrium parameter. Mr. Oldberg has also failed to understand my earlier point that merely because a phenomenon cannot yet be measured it is not legitimate to assume, as he does, that the phenomenon itself is not a scientific concept. Again, if he wants to argue about whether the IPCC should talk about climate sensitivity, that is a matter he should take up with the IPCC, not with me.
Mr. Arrak says climate sensitivity is zero, citing Ferenc Miskolczi. My own investigations certainly suggest that climate sensitivity is closer to zero than to the IPCC’s 3.26 K per CO2 doubling: but unfortunately Dr. Miskolczi’s results cannot yet be verified properly because our capacity to measure both absolute and relative humidity throughout the atmosphere is insufficient. A recent paper, though, has lent some support to his contention that there has been nothing like the increase in the concentration of water vapor that the Clausius-Clapeyron relation allows for. The IPCC’s mistake in this regard (if it is one, for measurements are not yet anything like good enough for us to be sure) is to assume that merely because a warmer atmospheric space can carry more water vapor it must do so.
Mr. Illis makes an interesting point about the apparent increase in the capacity of CO2 sinks: but, rather like Miskolczi’s conclusion, this one is also subject to such enormous uncertainties that one cannot say for sure. One merit of my little paper, I think, is that it is founded upon data that we can measure with quite a high degree of reliability.
Finally, Mr. Telford, in a characteristically ill-tempered, intemperate, and ignorant posting, says I ought to remember that the reciprocal of a quantity is equal to the quantity itself. That is equivalent to a statement that x = 1 / x, or x^2 = 1. The only non-complex solutions to that equation are (x = 1, x = -1). For all other values of x in R, the reciprocal of x does not equal x.
Frankly, there have been too many absurdly elementary errors in this thread from the true-believing climate-extremists. I do appreciate that they are now desperate, and that my result – which comes very close to definitively demonstrating that climate sensitivity is low enough to be harmless – is uncongenial. But, by not even getting their elementary arithmetic right, and by failing again and again to take note of the detailed responses and references that I have supplied, they do no favors to themselves or to their collapsing cause. One thing they have demonstrated brilliantly: it is only because ignorance of elementary mathematics and physics is so near-universal that those who have fabricated the climate scare have gotten away with it for so long. But their day is now done, and the sun has set on their nonsense.

Plants, oceans and soils are absorbing 2.0% per year of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere above the equilbrium level of 276 ppm.

I say equilibrium level because that is what it has been for the past 24 million years (give or take a 185 ppm in an ice age) and roughly what is was for the 8,000 years before our emissions started in earnest about 1750.

If we stopped emitting tomorrow, plants oceans and soils would go on absorbing 2.0% per year of the excess CO2 and, in about 100 years, we would be back to 291 ppm.

That is exactly what I am doing, considering “greenhouse gases warming” by itself, and by itself it excludes a negative feedback and includes a positive feedback.
=====================
If you are including a feedback, you cannot say in the same breath that you are considering CO2-induced warming *by itself.*

Either you consider it by itself or you don’t. If you include feedbacks, you need to consider all plausible feedbacks, not only the ones you like. For example, more water vapor doesn’t mean only more water vapor, it also means more clouds and therefore an increased albedo.

I will misericordiously assume you are just trolling and leave it at that.

The IPCC says that if CO2 was not emitted after 2000, the temperature rise would be 0.6 K, which is in the pipeline. What happens if we continue to emit CO2 through 2100? We get a rise of 2.8 K. Everyone agrees so far. Where we disagree is what is the net loss from the pipeline if the CO2 continues to rise because that can be subtracted from 2.8 K to get the real heating of CO2 in the 21st century. Monckton assumes all the 0.6 degrees is lost from the pipeline, leaving nothing in the pipeline at the end. I (and the IPCC) would argue that there is no net loss from the pipeline (possibly a gain), simply because CO2 still provides energy to the pipeline at the rate it is lost. You only get that energy out, in the net, if CO2 stops putting energy in, which only occurs if emission stops. In short, 2.8 K is the real gain, as the fluxes to/from the pipeline tend to cancel.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 1, 2012 at 1:55 pm:
“Mr. House states, meaninglessly, that “the greenhouse-gases warming notion alone supports only a positive feedback”. That is incorrect. …For these reasons, Mr. House’s assertion that anyone who assumes there is a greenhouse effect must also assume net-positive feedbacks is a grave misunderstanding of the elementary equations of climatological physics.
Mr. House goes on to say that I maintain a negative feedback is possible. …He then complains that I did not demonstrate that any negative feedback actually exists in the real climate, and does so immediately after mentioning one such negative feedback himself – evaporation.”
==========================================================

For the like 20th-30th time on this blog I have to start my answer to Christopher Monckton with the words “I did not say that” (sad). Christopher, I did not say “net-positive”, I said “positive”, these are 2 very different things. There can be a positive feedback but with a negative net-result because of other negative feedbacks, if there are any, of course, this is so obvious.

Second, I would like you to prove your statement that evaporation is a negative feedback in the context of alleged “greenhouse property” of water vapour. In other words, you can not take the evaporative cooling out of the context, because the process of evaporation leads also to a higher concentration of the “greenhouse gas” water vapour and thus (according to the AGW concept) contributes to warming. So, evaporation cools but water vapour allegedly warms, and you need to prove that its cooling effect is stronger that its warming effect. If you can not do that, your statement about evaporation being a negative feedback has no basis. I am looking forward to your scientific answer on this point. If you do not have any, you might consider a possibility to come up with another “negative feedback”, but please do not forget, that the “global warming”, “global temperature” etc. is about the surface temperature.

Paolo says:
September 1, 2012 at 2:09 pm:Greg House says:
September 1, 2012 at 12:00 pm
That is exactly what I am doing, considering “greenhouse gases warming” by itself, and by itself it excludes a negative feedback and includes a positive feedback.
If you are including a feedback, you cannot say in the same breath that you are considering CO2-induced warming *by itself.* Either you consider it by itself or you don’t.
====================================================

The alleged contradiction is not real, it is only the result of your possible misunderstanding, because you made “CO2-induced warming” out of my “greenhouse gases warming”.

Again, the “greenhouse gases warming” concept includes BOTH “CO2 induced warming” AND “water vapour induced warming”, and since “CO2 induced warming” produces more water vapour it produces thus also more “water vapour induced warming”, and this is a positive feedback.

Christopher Monckton again fails to understand or address the error (not errors) in his introductory paragraph that renders his estimate of climate sensitivity incorrect. I have made very clear what that error is, not least in my post of September 1, 2012 at 6:53 am. It is such an elementary error to deduct a value for an “in the pipeline” warming in 2000 without then adding a similar value in 2100 that I struggle to understand how anyone could not see that error. The error, incidentally, is in no way the fault of the IPCC and lies entirely at Monckton’s door. However, I do not intend to waste further time on the issue. No doubt, if there are any scientists of merit in those he has asked to review his article then they will point out this error to him once again.

Monckton is also apparently unable to recognise the conditional and illustrative nature of the derivation of the 0.75K per W/M^2 figure, even though I have stressed that to be the case. It was simply to point out what the “in the pipeline” value would have to be in 2100 in order to suggest a climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 of around 3K [since 0.75*5.35*ln2 = 2.78]. That “in the pipeline” warming in 2100 would need to be 1.1C if the value in 2000 is 0.6C. Since the proportionate rise in CO2 is greater in the 21st century than the 20th, that is not an unreasonable proposition, but that is all it is.

Your plot is of the rate of change of emissions growth divided by the rate of change of CO2 concentration, and hence the intercept only gives the slope of the relationship between cumulative emissions and atmospheric concentration. You also need the intercept in that relationship to be able to convert between the two and hence put the right numbers in to your equation 1.

Your error at this point should be quite clear, but here are the numbers, as you insist. Substituting equation (2) above,

C = k E + Co,

into

deltaT = 0.44*0.53*ln(C2/C1)

where C1 and C2 are the concentrations at the beginning and end of the period we obtain

deltaT = 0.44*5.35*ln[(kE2 +Co)/(kE1 + Co)] (3).

Hence to solve for the temperature change between 1960 and 2008, we solve equation 2 using k as the reciprocal of 15 GTonnesCO2/ppm, Co as 290 ppm and E1 and E2 from the reference you use, Boden et al., as a cumulative 308 GTonnes in 1960 and 1272 GTonnes in 2008, giving

deltaT = 0.44*5.35*ln[(1272/15+290)/(308/15 + 290)]

giving

deltaT = 0.44*5.35*ln (375/311) = 0.44 C

which is in good agreement with the 0.47 C derived from the concentration figures for these two particular years. Your figure of 0.27 C is the result of you incorrectly relating emissions to concentration, giving a fallacious fixed “quantum of emissions necessary to raise global temperatures by 1K”. There is no such thing!

There is no contradiction between the warming derived from concentration and emissions, and certainly no independent constraint.

Again, I strongly suggest you ask your previous reviewers to take a closer look if you are still unsure as to your error here.

I suggest that Jim D, whoever he or she is. should do as I suggested earlier and look at what the IPCC actually says, rather than making up his own interpretation of it. Of the 2.8 K anthropogenic warming that it posits as a central estimate taken as the mean of all six emissions scenarios, 0.6 K is explicitly stated to be in-the-pipeline warming that results from our past sins of emission. The remainder is what arises by 2100 as a result of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century. Like it or not, that is what the IPCC says, and if you want to dispute it then take the matter up with the IPCC, and do not waste my time with your interpretations, which, however seemingly ingenious, are at odds with what the IPCC actually says.

Mr. House should really not waste any more time displaying his bottomless ignorance on this site, which allows all comers but expects at least a rudimentary level of knowledge. Evaporation, whether he likes it or not, is a negative feedback, as was inadvertently revealed by Wentz et al. (2007), when they demonstrated that the actual increase in evaporation from the surface per Kelvin of surface warming is thrice what the models say it is. And, this time, I do not expect Mr. House to reply until he has read and understood their paper. I am tired of giving him references that he then fails to follow up.

Professor Lindzen has calculated that this consideration alone requires the officially-published central estimates of climate sensitivity to be divided by three. Mr. House burbles, irrelevantly and trivially, that evaporation increases the water vapor concentration in the atmosphere, and that water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Yes, it is, but the process of evaporation (which takes place at the surface, as demanded by Mr. House) is nonetheless a negative feedback, and one which the models currently greatly undervalue, because they are unduly obsessed with radiative transports and do not give sufficient attention or weight to non-radiative transports within the atmosphere.

Mr. House tiresomely demands another example of a negative feedback, even though in my previous answer to his drivel I had already mentioned the lapse-rate feedback. If he is not prepared to read my answers carefully, he should not continue this discussion.

And, finally, he takes refuge in pathetic semantics, saying that when he had talked of “positive” feedbacks he had not meant “net-positive” feedbacks. Well, that point too is trivial: Since he disagrees – on no scientific or other rational basis that has yet been stated – with the long-established results in process engineering and in climatology demonstrating that negative feedbacks exist, all feedbacks in his world will of course be both positive and net-positive: in that disfiguring and scientifically absurd circumstance, the terms are self-evidently interchangeable.

I suggest that he should go and do some elementary reading in mathematics and in climatological physics before he tries – I fear deliberately – to muddy the waters any further. All he does with his childishly petulant and shamefully ill-informed interventions is to clarify before everyone the depth and breadth of his own ignorance. I am willing – as previous postings here have amply demonstrated – to have a scientific discussion with those who are at least making a genuine attempt at discussing real science. Mr. House, however, starts from an absurd and scientifically-unwarrantable standpoint that there is no greenhouse effect, and – having thus abandoned the uses of reason a priori – is both temperamentally and educationally unequipped to conduct a rational, informed, logical scientific discussion. However, his interventions are perhaps of value in that they are yet further visible evidence of the sad level of general scientific and forensic ignorance that the climate extremists can and do so readily and ruthlessly exploit.

I should add you have misled yourself as to why you can ignore your admitted error.

You are right that you get away with it with regard to concentrations: this is because for a small relative change in concentrations between 1960 and 2008, from 317 to 386 ppm, the logarithmic relationship is close to linear for a change of around 20%, with only a 2% error. But this is not the case for emissions. They have increased from 308 to 1272 GTonnes, some 420%, and a linear approximation is off 65%. This is not a second order effect!

Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 1, 2012 at 3:56 pm:
“Evaporation, whether he likes it or not, is a negative feedback, as was inadvertently revealed by Wentz et al. (2007), when they demonstrated that the actual increase in evaporation from the surface per Kelvin of surface warming is thrice what the models say it is…. Mr. House burbles, irrelevantly and trivially, that evaporation increases the water vapor concentration in the atmosphere, and that water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Yes, it is, but the process of evaporation (which takes place at the surface, as demanded by Mr. House) is nonetheless a negative feedback,…”
===================================================

Christopher, first of all, certain properties of your rhetoric do not bother me directly, but they can easily damage your reputation among the readers, and this bothers me. Please consider sticking just to the scientific points and refraining from certain particularly inappropriate expressions.

MODELS??? Who is talking about models? You are essentially stuck on the possible lowest level: definitions and what immediately follows.

As I said before, the process of evaporation is releasing water vapour in the air. You mean it is a negative feedback? Prove it. You apparently know that there is such an effect as evaporative cooling. At the same time you accept the “greenhouse effect” that includes warming properties of water vapour. So, the process of evaporation allegedly contributes to both cooling and warming at the same time. And you mean that the net effect is cooling? Then prove it.

But OK, I am not going to “torture” you scientifically any further, you are already sitting in a scientific trap. Because if the net effect of the process of evaporation is COOLING, then the water vapour is not a greenhouse gas any longer per definition. If it is WARMING, then it is contrary to your statement not a negative feedback, it is then a positive feedback.

So, I suggest you acknowledge that and come up with another “negative feedback”. And please think twice before you bring that “lapse-rate” again.

I will just say that the pipeline (aka the ocean heat content excess) had a net gain in the 20th century.There is no expectation of a net loss in the 21st century. At least the same warming will still be in the pipeline in 2100. You can’t pay into the atmospheric budget from the pipeline, because at least as much leaks in the other direction as it was doing in the 20th century.

The alleged contradiction is not real, it is only the result of your possible misunderstanding, because you made “CO2-induced warming” out of my “greenhouse gases warming”.

Again, the “greenhouse gases warming” concept includes BOTH “CO2 induced warming” AND “water vapour induced warming”, and since “CO2 induced warming” produces more water vapour it produces thus also more “water vapour induced warming”, and this is a positive feedback.
===================
The subject of Monckton’s paper is climate sensitivity to CO2, which of course is the result of CO2 forcing plus the net balance of *all* feedbacks of either sign. An increase in water vapor is definitely one of the feedbacks that results from an increase in CO2 forcing, and it is a positive feedback. So what? Water vapor is itself the result of evaporation, which by itelf has a cooling effect. And water vapor results in more clouds, which also have a cooling effect. In any case, the water vapor that is a feedback of CO2 forcing cannot, by definition, be part of said CO2 forcing, which seems to be what you are claiming (to the extent it’s even possible to know what you are arguing about). Water vapor appears to be the only feedback you acknowledge from the CO2 forcing, to the point you want to make it part of the forcing itself, or at least declare it’s the only feedback worth considering.

Greg House says:
You apparently know that there is such an effect as evaporative cooling.
[…]
But OK, I am not going to “torture” you scientifically any further
====================
So first you question wether evaporation causes cooling and almost immediately you brag about torturing people “scientifically”. You have made an ass of yourself long enough and no one should reply to your brayings anymore.

Greg House:”As I said before, the process of evaporation is releasing water vapour in the air. You mean it is a negative feedback? Prove it. You apparently know that there is such an effect as evaporative cooling. At the same time you accept the “greenhouse effect” that includes warming properties of water vapour. So, the process of evaporation allegedly contributes to both cooling and warming at the same time. And you mean that the net effect is cooling? Then prove it.”

Respectfully, you are confused here. It is not evaporation that is a positive GH feedback, it is the *presence* of water vapor. Ultimately, for the water cycle to be in balance, evaporation must equal precipitation but this, on its own does not establish what the concentration of WV is. For instance, the climate models usually predict that a 1C temperature increase will increase WV by ~6% but only increase evaporation by btw 1-3%. OTOH, the Wentz 2007 study referenced earlier suggests that the actual increase in evaporation is ~6% which implies a much higher negative feedback from evaporation following a temperature increase. IAC, see this link for more detail on the evaporation-lapse rate feedback.

Let me reply again to the various bizarre scientific points that are now being raised.
First, it is intellectually dishonest of “Tom P.”, who continues to lurk furtively behind a pseudonym, to say that I have admitted an error, when there was no error and, therefore, I did not admit one. Before I wrote the paper, I carried out careful calculations to satisfy myself that over the relevant period the relationship between changes in CO2 concentration and changes in temperature was very nearly linear because the climate-sensitivity parameter tended to grow with time, and that would offset the logarithmic decline in the forcing effectiveness of CO2.
Realizing this, “Tom P.” now shifts his ground and points out that CO2 emissions have increased fourfold over the period of study. So they have, but it remains true that the relation between the rate of change in emissions and the rate of change in concentration shows no trend over the period. Since the relation between the rate of change in concentration and the rate of change in temperature is also very nearly linear, for the reason I have just explained, it is legitimate for me to find the relation between the rate of change in emissions and the rate of change in temperature near-invariant over the short timescales concerned.

I repeat that if “Tom P.” wishes his argument to be taken seriously he or she must first reveal his or her identity and then carry out a quantitative analysis to demonstrate why he or she considers my analysis to be at fault. For mathematics is the language of science; equations are its grammar; and quantities are its vocabulary. If “Tom P.” continues to fail to deploy a quantitative analysis, then – scientifically speaking – he has nothing whatever to say.
Mr. House whines that he does not like me pointing out his ignorance. Then he should cease to display it. I had invited him to read Wentz et al., so that he could understand the implications of their finding that surface evaporation per Kelvin of surface warming increases at thrice the rate predicted by the models, but instead of reading it he asks me who is talking about models. The answer, as he would have known if he had read either my previous answer to him or Wentz’s paper, is of course Wentz. Shawnhet, another correspondent on this thread, has read and understood Wentz’s paper: is it really too much to ask that Mr. House should at least attempt to do the same? When (or if) Mr. House has read Wentz’s paper and understood it, let him come back here and discuss this matter further. If, however, he will not read the reference he is given, there is no point in answering him further on this aspect of the discussion. He appears not to understand that evaporation as a result of surface warming is a negative feedback; that an increase in atmospheric water vapor as a result of not only surface warming but, more importantly, of the warming of the space occupied by the atmosphere is a positive feedback in accordance with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation; but that, as Wentz’s paper and Shawnhet’s comment both helpfully point out, increased evaporation tends to be matched by increased precipitation.

Since my paper did not make any attempt quantitatively to disentangle the negative feedback from evaporation (which is thrice what the models thought) from the zero feedback caused by the additional water vapor in the atmosphere caused by the additional evaporation (for it simply precipitates out again), or from the positive feedback potentially caused by the increased Clausius-Clapeyron carrying capacity of the atmospheric space for water vapor as that space warms, his insistence that I now do so is off topic. He had asked me to identify any negative feedback, and I identified two of many: evaporative cooling, and the lapse-rate feedback.
Even if feedbacks are zero or somewhat net-negative, adding CO2 or any other greenhouse gas to the atmosphere will cause some warming, so Mr. House’s implication that because he infers that certain feedbacks may cancel each other out there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect is nonsense. Let him do some reading before he makes a still greater idiot of himself. He might usefully begin with the numerous references I have already given him. I have been very patient; but, as I have said, if he continues to argue aprioristically rather than logically and rationally he will make no useful contribution to the debate.

“Jim D.” equates the IPCC’s imagined (and, if my result is correct, imaginary) warming in the pipeline with what he calls an “excess” of ocean heat content. However, we remain unable to measure the heat content of the ocean reliably, so we have no idea whether there was a net gain in ocean heat content in the 20th century. Even the 3000+ Argo bathythermograph buoys, which since 2006 have been providing better coverage than ever before, are the equivalent of taking a single temperature and salinity profile at one location in the whole of Lake Superior less than once a year, as Willis Eschenbach pointed out in one of his distinguished contributions to this blog. Attempting to draw any conclusions from so sparse a sampling plainly has its limitations, to put it mildly.

Furthermore, in the IPCC’s speculative theory, warming in the pipeline comes chiefly not from some supposed (but not demonstrable) increase in ocean heat content but rather from the gradual coming into effect of long-acting temperature feedbacks (such as the supposed progressive loss of global ice cover and a consequent decrease in the Earth’s albedo).
However, his confusion on the matter of the warming in the pipeline is not so much his fault as that of the IPCC, which ought to have produced a curve of the change in the value of the climate-sensitivity parameter over time to allow direct verification of the extent to which the feedbacks it imagines (not one of which can be measured) are having the influence it imagines they will have. Yet the IPCC very deliberately does not do this. Indeed, it does not even quantify the zero-feedback or instantaneous value of the climate-sensitivity parameter until its Fourth Assessment Report, and only then in a footnote on p. 631. It provides no explicit statement of the centennial-scale, bicentennial-scale or equilibrium sensitivity parameters; however, as explained in the Annex, I have deduced their values as 0.44, 0.49, and 0.88 Kelvin per Watt per square meter respectively. From these values, it follows that most of the warming that is in the pipeline will not come out of it until long after the period of study, so the world will have millennia to adjust to it, and it need not concern us at all as policy-makers today.

You ask for a quantitative analysis: you have been given one in my comment of September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm, clearly demonstrating that the data for concentration and emissions give the equivalent warming for the period 1960 to 2008 of 0.46 K and 0.44K.

Your value of 0.28 C is a result of your faulty analysis, evidenced by you calculating a “quantum of emissions” for a 1K warming. Such a constant quantum does not exist. You have admitted your error here, hoping it had no appreciable effect on your calculation over this period. For emissions, that hope is misplaced, as the numbers show.

There is no independent constraint on climate sensitivity available using the emissions rather than the concentration data. This should be hardly surprising given the linear relationship between the two.

I suggest you read the comment of September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm , and if you still remain unclear as to your error, ask one of the scientists whom has seen your draft to go over it with you.

Here we go again. Tom P still insists I have admitted to an error. No, I have not. I have merely indicated that an assertion of his is trivially true but does not cut athwart my analysis in any material respect. In the circumstances, it is intellectually dishonest of him to assert that I have admitted an error.

He then at last provides an argument with numbers in it: but all that argument does is to run my analysis backwards to its starting point and then to dismiss my argument on the ground that he has succeeded in reaching the starting-point. That is a novel instance of the argumentum ad petitionem principii – the begging-the-question fallacy.

My own argument starts from two simple observations that are derived directly from the data. First, that over this century the relationship between increases in CO2 concentration and projected increases in temperature is near-invariant, because the growth in the value of the climate-sensitivity parameter more or less exactly offsets the logarithmic diminution in the additional forciing that arises from each additional unit increase in CO2 concentration.
Let me demonstrate this quantitatively. Using the IPCC’s implicit climate-sensitivity parameter of 0.44 K/W/m2 for the whole of the 21st century, I have already established that one requires about 223 ppmv of additional CO2 concentration to generate 1 K of additional warming.
Now consider just the next four years, rather than the next 100 years. Here, because the time-frame is so short, a value for the climate-sensitivity parameter that is very close to the instantaneous value is appropriate: let us say 0.35 K/W/m2 rather than the instantaneous 0.31.

Then, taking the IPCC’s central estimates of CO2 concentrations over the next four years (derivable from Table 10.26 of the Fourth Assessment Report), warming over 2012-2015 inclusive would be 0.35[5.35 ln(402.6/392.5)] = 0.0476 K. Additional concentration per Kelvin of warming is then (402.6 – 392.5) / 0.0476 = 212.2 ppmv K–1. But this value is very close to the 223 ppmv/K calculated by the same method using the IPCC’s projections for the whole of the 21st century. That, I hope, establishes the near-invariance of the relation between CO2 concentration increase and temperature increase over the period of study.

But, as I think Tom P. accepts, over decadal to centennial timescales there is also a near-invariant relation between CO2 emissions increase and CO2 concentration increase.
Accordingly, little error arises if, over the period of study, we assume two constants: 15.5 Gte CO2 emissions increase per ppmv concentration increase; and about 220 ppmv CO2 concentration increase per Kelvin of temperature increase. Multiplying these two gives a third constant relevant to the period of study: namely the CO2 emissions increase per Kelvin of temperature increase. It cannot legitimately be said that the relation between CO2 emissions and temperature change is irrelevant, since that is precisely the point that everyone is arguing about.

Once the value of that constant is accepted, the rest of the argument follows. We know that there were 975 Gte CO2 emitted from 1960-2008, which is equivalent to 0.28 K, not to the 0.46 K that one would expect by applying the IPCC’s implicit 21st-century climate-sensitivity parameter to the period 1960-2008.

Mr. Oldberg wanders off topic by saying that equilibrium surface temperature is permanently unobservable. Whether it is or is not permanently unobservable, it is not currently observable, which is why, as I have had to point out to Mr. Oldberg twice before, my own analysis concentrated on the shorter-term sensitivity parameters whose effect is indeed currently observable, at least to some extent.

I must indeed apologize to Mr. Telford for having misread what he had written: on my screen his equation had indeed been mangled, as I had at first suspected, and I had not noted that he had used “the reciprocal of” twice in succession in his subsequent posting. His point appears to be that my argument is circular. But a careful read of my paper will indicate that this is not so. I begin by establishing the relation between the CO2 concentration increase and warming, deriving it from the IPCC’s own central estimate of 21st-century CO2 concentration increase and warming. Earlier in this posting, I have established that over the period of study this relation is near-invariant. I continue by independently establishing the near-invariant relation between CO2 emissions and CO2 concentration increase over the period of available data, which is 1960-2008. Multiplying these two near-invariant relations gives a new relation that is also near-invariant over the period we are concerned with: that of CO2 emissions and temperature change. It works out at about 3450 Gte CO2 per Kelvin.

Next, to find out how much of the 0.66 K observed warming from 1960-2008 was caused by CO2 emissions, I divide the measured emissions of 975 Gte CO2 over the period by 3450 Gte CO2, to yield 0.28 K, not the 0.46 K that the IPCC’s methods would lead us to expect. Finally, from this lower warming value, I derive a new and lower value of the climate-sensitivity parameter appropriate at centennial scale: namely, 0.27 K/W/m2, which, when applied to the 21st century, suggests that CO2-driven warming to 2100 will be less than 1 K. And that is it. It is quite straightforward and there is really no need to make such heavy weather of it.

Slioch continues to refuse to read the IPCC’s documents at the points I have previously referenced. If he want to argue with the IPCC’s 0.28 K of 21st-century warming, of which it states 0.6 K is already in the pipeline, then he should take the matter up not with me but with the IPCC. As I have already twice explained, the other end of the pipeline need not – and probably does not – occur within the next couple of hundred years, in which event it is simply not policy-relevant today. Slioch needs to learn that if he receives – as he has, on several occasions – a detailed answer to his assertions, then he must address those answers directly rather than childishly (and erroneously) repeating that I (or, rather, the IPCC) had made an error.

Slioch sneers that I am “apparently unable to recognise the conditional and illustrative nature of the derivation of the 0.75K per W/M^2 figure. Well, what he originally said was that that value was “in line with IPCC”. I had assumed that he had meant what he said, but I take it he now concedes he cannot find authority for this absurdly high value in the IPCC’s documents. He has, yet again, failed to take any note of my point that since the IPCC’s central estimate of the equilibrium-sensitivity parameter is 0.88 K/W/m2, and since equilibrium will not occur for 1000-3000 years (Solomon et al., 2009), suggesting a centennial-scale climate-sensitivity parameter that comes close to that value (and also exceeds by an absurd 50% the 0.49 K/W/m2 bicentennial parameter assumed by the IPCC for 1900-2100) is implausible in the extreme.
The climate extremists need to raise their game. Their arguments to date have been startlingly unmeritorious: but perhaps that is not unsurprising, now that 15 years without global warming has established a clear discrepancy between what the models had predicted and observed reality. Their central projections of future warming are indeed exaggerated, and it is becoming harder and harder – whether by the obfuscations and diversions we have seen here or by the publication of absurdly inaccurate IPCC reports – to conceal that fact.

Paolo says:
September 1, 2012 at 8:47 pm
“Greg House says:
You apparently know that there is such an effect as evaporative cooling.
[…]
But OK, I am not going to “torture” you scientifically any further”

So first you question wether evaporation causes cooling and almost immediately you brag about torturing people “scientifically”. You have made an ass of yourself long enough and no one should reply to your brayings anymore."
==============================================

Using your "[…]" nasty trick you certainly can let everything look like nonsense, well done.

It appears you did not take my advice to show your draft to a scientist who would be able to correct you on your analysis. At least your response should be making it clearer to others as to how you have confused yourself.

Your write:

“But, as I think Tom P. accepts, over decadal to centennial timescales there is also a near-invariant relation between CO2 emissions increase and CO2 concentration increase.
Accordingly, little error arises if, over the period of study, we assume two constants: 15.5 Gte CO2 emissions increase per ppmv concentration increase; and about 220 ppmv CO2 concentration increase per Kelvin of temperature increase. Multiplying these two gives a third constant relevant to the period of study: namely the CO2 emissions increase per Kelvin of temperature increase. It cannot legitimately be said that the relation between CO2 emissions and temperature change is irrelevant, since that is precisely the point that everyone is arguing about.”

The problem comes when you multiply the two constants together, as there is an offset in the emissions/concentration relationship. Hence while there is an approximate linear relationship between increase in concentration and increase in temperature between 1960 and 2008, and a very good linear relationship between emissions and concentration, though with an offset of around 300 ppm, there is not a linear relationship between emissions and the increase in temperature due to that offset.

Furthermore, while using a linear approximation for the logarithmic function for the small relative change in concentration, from 317 to 386 ppm, is justified, it is not valid for the large, non-linear change in cumulative emissions that have increased from 308 to 1272 MTonnes CO2 (equivalent to 86 to 346 MTonnes of C):

The fault in your analysis in assuming a constant emissions per temperature rise is clear if you look at the emissions produced in the first and last decade of your period. As you state in your paper, you have taken the temperature as a linear trend over that period. Hence if there was a valid constant emissions per temperature, that would correspond to a similar quantity of emissions in the first and last decade.

In fact from 1960 to 1970, there were around 6 GTonnes of CO2 produced, while from 1998 to 2008 there were 11 GTonnes. Your data should have told you immediately that it was incorrect to base an analysis on a constant “quantum of emissions” for a given amount of warming.

At no point have I said that the relationship between CO2 emissions and temperature is irrelevant. What I have said is that you were incorrect to state that is has a constant value. It is the confusion in your maths that has caused you to get a different sensitivity using concentration and emissions.

It should now be clear that as both emissions and concentration give equivalent warming when properly calculated, there is no independent constraint on climate sensitivity emerging from you faulty analysis.

JimD said, “I will just say that the pipeline (aka the ocean heat content excess) had a net gain in the 20th century.There is no expectation of a net loss in the 21st century. At least the same warming will still be in the pipeline in 2100. You can’t pay into the atmospheric budget from the pipeline, because at least as much leaks in the other direction as it was doing in the 20th century.”

The oceans did have a net gain during the 20th century, mainly in the northern hemisphere where the majority of the warming took place. However, the the energy gained is just as likely due to recovery from ice age cooling which had a greater impact on the northern hemisphere than the southern. The thermal mass of the globe is not symmetrical, the solar forcing on the global is not symmetrical and the ocean heat uptake was not symmetrical. CO2 induced warming should be somewhat symmetrical.

JimD, most of you “beliefs” are based on linear assumptions made in a highly non-linear system. The data is there if you care to join the debate instead of repeating talking points.

Shawnhet says:
September 1, 2012 at 10:46 pm:Greg House:”As I said before, the process of evaporation is releasing water vapour in the air. You mean it is a negative feedback? Prove it. You apparently know that there is such an effect as evaporative cooling. At the same time you accept the “greenhouse effect” that includes warming properties of water vapour. So, the process of evaporation allegedly contributes to both cooling and warming at the same time. And you mean that the net effect is cooling? Then prove it.”
Respectfully, you are confused here. It is not evaporation that is a positive GH feedback, it is the *presence* of water vapor.
================================================

I do not see any confusion. First of all, I did not say “it is evaporation that is a positive GH feedback”, so your “it is not evaporation that is a positive GH feedback” simply misses the point. The best way to avoid confusion is not to replace the opponent’s words with what you think he meant.

Again, the first essential point is that evaporation has (according to the AGW concept) at the same time 2 opposite effects: evaporative cooling effect and “greenhouse warming” effect. Any problem with that? Then the next step. Depending on the real numbers, the overall effect of evaporation can be cooling or warming. Any problem with that step? If no, then the next step.

As I said, if the the overall effect of evaporation is cooling, then water vapour is not a “greenhouse gas” per definition. If the the overall effect of evaporation is warming, then it is not a negative feedback, it is a positive feedback then.

Now, within the AGW concept water vapour IS a warming “greenhouse gas”, so you can not at the same time support that concept and maintain that the evaporation is a negative feedback. It is a clear contradiction and I hope that Christopher Monckton realises that sooner or later and drops it. If he hopes that warmists will not be able to see his contradiction, then it is a bad strategy.

“Jim Cripwell says:
August 31, 2012 at 3:50 am
I am an empiricist; I only trust hard, measured data. On the subject of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity, the only thing that can actually be measured is total climate sensitivity; how much do global temperatures rise as a result of a given rise in the amount of CO2 in the atmopshere. In theory we can measure total climate sensitivity. We can measure how much CO2 concentrations rise; we can measure how much atmospheric temperatures rise, assuming they are still rising. All we need to do is to prove how much of any observed temperature rise is due to the change in CO2 concentration.

What I cannot understand is why there is so little interest in making an attempt to actually measure total climate sensitivity. If we could actually measure it, it would be like a Michelson/Morley moment; it would settle whether CAGW exists for all time.
”
*************************************
It’s easy to ascertain the overall average sensitivity based on rather well accepted values. I’ve shown it on threads here before. It comes out to around 0.22 (0.218) K per W/m^2. That’s the average from the very first w/m^2 of atmospheric absorption from ghgs and clouds up to the most recent ones. Note that by the ipcc’s own words (a W/m^2 effect is assumed to be a W/m^2 effect regardless of what changes ) that a large variance between the average and the modern instantaneous sensitivity tends to falsify that hypothesis. Also, the 0.22 value does not include any feedback contributions from a slight rise in T which would bring it even closer to the 0.27 value mentioned by the author. The main feedback, h2o vapor, adds a tiny fraction of 0.22 to the total as a 5 deg C rise would be required to achieve a 30% increase in h2o vapor and it, like co2, is well into the log mode with between 2 and 3 times the power absorption per doubling as for a co2 doubling.
Note that a sensitivity of over 0.3 K / w/m^2 is necessary for surface T for a blackbody so any sensitivity less than that is indicative of a net negative feedback. That is, the positive feedbacks reduce the total net negative value a bit.

The problem with sensitivity is that co2 is a bit player while albedo, mostly due to cloud cover, is the main actor. There is no good history of albedo measurement data. You can find that most sensitivity research has ignored this as a variable and hence has created a nightmare of inaccuracy and over stated values. Also, it doesn’t help the Cagw case any.

As for M&M, it’s done a good job for a century but all theories need continual testing (and not just undergraduate students). After all, now we know the direction and speed Earth is traveling wrt the microwave background radiation as measured by WMAP which would be the velocity through the aether assuming it existed. LOL

Tom P.”The problem comes when you multiply the two constants together, as there is an offset in the emissions/concentration relationship. Hence while there is an approximate linear relationship between increase in concentration and increase in temperature between 1960 and 2008, and a very good linear relationship between emissions and concentration, though with an offset of around 300 ppm, there is not a linear relationship between emissions and the increase in temperature due to that offset.”

I must admit I don’t follow the disagreement that you and Mr Monckton are having or the reasoning behind using the emissions data at all(as separate from the concentration) but what you have written above isn’t accurate IMO. If we are talking about concentrations between 317 and 713 ppm, then establishing the relationship btw emissions and temperature change in the way MoncKton has done is perfectly reasonable IMO. Obviously the relationship btw CO2 and temp change is only approximately linear but this will only give you a slight difference in the calculations over the period in question.

BTW, what makes you think that there is an offset at about 300ppm anyway? I don’t see why there would be one.

There is much conceptual confusion about the relation of the pipeline to the earth’s energy imbalance to the ocean heat content. I recommend Hansen’s 2011 energy imbalance paper for a clear and up-to-date exposition on the subject.http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha06510a.html
Essentially, the radiative warming from CO2 is not immediately balanced by the increase in surface temperature as some goes into the deep ocean. This results in a radiative imbalance that continues to warm the earth and deep ocean until the surface temperature has risen to offset the CO2 effect. In reality it never catches up if the CO2 keeps increasing, leading to the energy imbalance being a semi-permanent state, and the pipeline warming in the ocean being a thermal inertia that delays the equilibrium until after the forcing has stopped changing.
The paper talks about the interplay of the aerosol effect and deep ocean mixing in controlling this energy imbalance, and how better measurements of the imbalance will help with separating these effects on the observed record.

In the article at http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/monckton_climate_sensitivity.pdf you state that “Warming delta T is simply delta F multiplied by some climate sensitivity parameter lambda.” In your comment of Sept. 1, 2012 at 1:55 pm, you state that “My paper did not, repeat not, depend upon the equilibrium sensitivity parameter.” From the content of the two statements, I gather that lambda does not reference the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter but rather references a similar idea with the equilibrium temperature replaced by the actual temperature. Lamda, then, is the proportionality constant in a function that maps the change in the forcing to the change in the temperature. However, there can be no such function for in the period after a change in the forcing, the temperature is time varying.

The offset of a little less than 300 ppm, Co, is just the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, C, before there were any appreciable anthropogenic emissions, E, as expressed in my equation 2 above,

C = k E + Co (2).

Monckton has ignored this offset in his calculations, and hence miscalculated a different answer, 0.27 K, for the warming from emissions compared to the value he had calculated from concentration, 0.46 K. Rather than hearing a warning bell that maybe an error had crept in, Monckton posted this paper asserting that he had found an independent, and much lower, constraint for the climate sensitivity on the basis of the emissions data.

If the offset of equation 2 is included, I have shown that the warming from emissions over this period comes to 0.44 K, in close agreement to the 0.46 K value Monckton calculated from the increase in concentration.

Monckton set off to prove a lower constraint to climate sensitivity, but has ended up demonstrating a rather different constraint in his analytical methodology.

Tom P, it seems as though your issue here revolves around the following from the OP:”From 1960-2008, the trend in the ratios of annual global CO2 emissions to annual increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations does not differ significantly from zero (Fig. 1).”

You appear to be arguing that it is impossible for the trend in two related phenomena to be the same if one trend starts at 300 units and another starts at 0. However, this is incorrect. If you have someone with $300 in the bank whose bank balance is increasing by way of a trend of $2 a year and someone with a bank balance of $0 but also with a trend of $2/year increase the ratio of the two is 1. You seem to be arguing in effect for the fact that the average balance in bank account 1 is greater than ave. bal in bank acct 2 which is true but does not address the point at issue.

Reality check here: the molecules of CO2 are the same whether you consider emissions separately or not. Regardless of whether we look at those number of molecules as being determined by a formula KE+Co or any other function, our calculated amount of warming should be same. I am sure that if we constructed a GH forcing function in terms of moles of CO2 we would probably have to include what you call an offset.

Your banking analogy nicely demonstrates where Monckton’s maths let him down. Both of the bank balances have the same growth, but you can’t calculate the ratio of the final amount to the initial amount over, say, five years by just knowing the amount that the balance has increased in that time. You need to know the starting balance for that.

Likewise, I certainly wouldn’t choose to put my money into an investment scheme based solely on how much money it would make me in a year. I would insist on also knowing what amount I had to invest in the first place! An annual return of $100 looks very good if I only have to put down $100, but lousy if $1m is required, although both investments are returning at the same rate of $100 a year.

Monckton tried to solve for the climate sensitivity using just the growth in emissions to calculate the temperature rise. But equation 1 requires the ratio between two numbers and to get that ratio from the emissions data requires the amounts at both the start and end of the period.

I would hope by now that Monckton realises his error. The independent constraint on climate sensitivity he has presented does not exist. It is just a result of his misunderstanding of how to do the calculation.

Those arguing whether evaporation is a negative feedback or not should remember that essentially all the water that evaporated subsequently condenses and precipitates. The latent heat absorbed during evaporation is released on precipitation, and there is no net cooling.
Reality gets slightly more complex as latent heat can be transported, cooling regions with net evaporation and warming regions where latent heat is released.

Let me explain again to “Tom P.” exactly what the calculation in my paper actually does. It is not possible to distinguish between the contributions to observed warming as between those from Nature and those from Man: all we know is that since 1960 the world has warmed by two-thirds of a Kelvin. However, it is possible to determine by looking forward to the next century how much CO2-driven warming the IPCC predicts; and, using that information, to determine the climate-sensitivity parameter that it implies.
Now, the c.s.p. curve is a slippery customer: the IPCC fails to make it explicit. However, it is possible to deduce, by the methods explained in the paper and particularly in the annex, that the instantaneous c.s.p. is 0.31 K/W/m2; that the centennial-scale c.s.p. is 0.44 K/W/m2; that the bicentennial-scale c.s.p. is 0.49 K/W/m2; and that the asymptote, which is the equilibrium c.s.p., is 0.88 K/W/m2. Broadly speaking, I should expect the evolution of the c.s.p. from forcing to equilibrium to follow the S-curve of an epidemic; and the best way to model it, as with modeling an epidemic, is to use matrix addition. However, these considerations are for another day.
The IPCC’s implicit estimated centennial-scale c.s.p. is determined in my paper by looking forward to 2100, using the IPCC’s own central estimates of CO2 concentration growth. You have agreed that the relation between CO2 concentration change and temperature change over the limited periods under consideration is near-invariant; so, applied during the 20th and 21st centuries, we may take it as constant.
Now for the relation between CO2 emissions change and CO2 concentration change. Here, my Fig. 1, derived by the methods and data set forth in Tables 1 to 5 of the Annex, agrees with original research by Dr. Patrick Michaels that shows a linear relation between the two. Notice that we are dealing not with CO2 concentration C, where the 300 ppmv offset that you mention would be relevant, but with CO2 concentration change delta-C. In this crucial respect, the route by which we reached today’s concentration is not relevant. It is for this reason that Shawnhet is correct in his conclusion that the offset is irrelevant: and his dollar analogy is apt.
I am not claiming a relation between emissions and concentration, but between the changes in each. Stand back for a moment and consider this. Surely it is not implausible to think – as the data strongly confirm – that there is a linear relationship between the change in emissions and the change in concentration? This is not a particularly surprising result: but it is certainly a result that has received insufficient attention since Dr. Michaels first discovered it. For, as I have demonstrated, it does indeed hold the key to providing a simple but robust check on the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity estimates.
The second point in your latest posting is that it is not reasonable to assume a linear relation between emissions growth and concentration growth from 1960-2008. I have not assumed it: I have determined it, using the actual data. And it is self-evident from Fig. 1 and from the full description of the data and methods by which it was determined that at no point was I assuming that temperature over that period had changed in a straight line. My sole reason for calculating the least-squares linear-regression trend on the data was to establish how much warming had occurred over the entire period. My calculations for Fig. 1 were, as stated in the paper and its annex, determined year by year on the data.
So there was nothing “faulty” in my analysis. An independent method of verifying the IPCC’s global-warming projections now indeed exists: and it demonstrates, not greatly to the surprise of most readers of this column, that climate sensitivity has been significantly overstated.
Tom P.’s interventions were based in what appears to have been a misunderstanding of what I had written. Here, I think, I am somewhat to blame. In trying to be brief I had become obscure. In the light of this and other comments, I shall be reworking the paper to improve its clarity and to expand the discussion at points where it is now too compressed for the scientifically-literate general reader. Once again, I am grateful to those whose contributions have assisted in clarifying the argument.

”
Jim D says:
September 2, 2012 at 9:45 am
There is much conceptual confusion about the relation of the pipeline to the earth’s energy imbalance to the ocean heat content. I recommend Hansen’s 2011 energy imbalance paper for a clear and up-to-date exposition on the subject.http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha06510a.html
Essentially, the radiative warming from CO2 is not immediately balanced by the increase in surface temperature as some goes into the deep ocean. This results in a radiative imbalance that continues to warm the earth and deep ocean until the surface temperature has risen to offset the CO2 effect. In reality it never catches up if the CO2 keeps increasing, leading to the energy imbalance being a semi-permanent state, and the pipeline warming in the ocean being a thermal inertia that delays the equilibrium until after the forcing has stopped changing.
The paper talks about the interplay of the aerosol effect and deep ocean mixing in controlling this energy imbalance, and how better measurements of the imbalance will help with separating these effects on the observed record.
”
**********
None of the IR makes it past the skin of the surface of the ocean. All of the energy is absorbed at the top small section and very little of it transfers by conduction downward. The only places where the ocean is moving surface water downward is in small areas of much colder climate – not where there is substantial incoming solar and higher atmospheric temperatures near the surface. Have you ever tried to boil a pan of water by placing a hotplate upside down on the top? All of the mechanisms that make it straight forward and easy to boil water sitting in a pan on top of the hotplate are now working against the attempt. The same goes for the vast amount of oceans.

Visible light, almost 50% of total incoming solar, penetrates the surface to significant depths, some beyond a few hundred feet. LW IR emitted by atmospheric temperatures doesn’t get past the skin, well under an inch. It results in increased evaporation. Water vapor is a lighter molecule, 18, vs the average of 28.8. Like helium, it will rise, absorbing more IR energy and reducing its density even more (like a hot air balloon rises). It will rise until the water vapor is forced to become liquid/solid as the RH rises with decreasing T. At that point, the heat of evaporation absorbed by the water at the surface will be given up, well above most ghg effects and well above the surface.

My experience with reading hansen papers is that if he says it, it’s most likely wrong or totally unsupported by the facts presented.

You write “Surely it is not implausible to think – as the data strongly confirm – that there is a linear relationship between the change in emissions and the change in concentration? This is not a particularly surprising result: but it is certainly a result that has received insufficient attention since Dr. Michaels first discovered it.”

In fact the fatal flaw in your paper, and one you appear to be blind to, is that you cannot determine a change in temperature from equation 1 from a single value for the growth in emissions from 1960 to 2008. You should really have suspected an error as soon as you calculated a result for the degree of warming from emissions that differed from the value derived from concentration.

And if Dr. Michaels presented his research as original, you have been rather misled. The linear relationship between CO2 concentration and emissions was well know more than two decades ago. The first IPCC report in 1990 states: “the observed rate of CO2 increase closely parallels the the accumulated emissions trends from fossil fuel combustion and land use changes” (IPPC 1, Chapter 1 p 14). In fact it was highlighted in IPPC 1 as evidence for an anthropogenic source of the measured change in the CO2 in the atmosphere.

You appear to have reinvented the wheel, but this time as square. I agree, a little rework of the paper would be a good idea.

rgbatduke says: “…a certain amount of absurdity, e.g. spending 40 years making a journey that is at most a few weeks on foot today.”

RGB-san: If you are going to get Biblical on us (and I’d just as soon that you didn’t), you should keep in mind that the Arabic word for “forty,” Arba’een ( الأربعين ), is also used for “many.” In the manner of most things in that region, as it was then, it is today, and vice versa. When the Bible says, for example, that Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights, it means that he did so for a long time, not a literal 40. There are those that believe otherwise, but the less said about them, the better.

TomP: I checked your linked graphs, thank you, and noted that 1) the range of CO2 concentrations is fairly narrow, (316 to 383 ppm), representing a short time span. 2) CO2 concentrations vs time are highly autocorrelated. 3) anthropogenic emissions are also highly autocorrelated over time. Furthermore, 4) the CO2 cycle is very complex and not well understood. 5) there is no rigorous proof of causation between anthropogenic emissions and total CO2 concentrations. Studies using two such highly autocorrelated variables often result in conclusions akin to “global warming is caused by pirates.” I think that is what you’ve done here, Matey.

Greg House says: “The concept of “greenhouse gases warming” excludes [this word changes meaning herein!] a negative feedback [so you claim]. You can not have both at the same time. [yes you can] If the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” is correct [it isn’t], then you generally must have more warming if you have more “greenhouse gases” (until the effect is saturated). If warming increases concentration of water vapour in the air and water vapour is a “greenhouse gas”, then you will inevitably get more warming, this is a positive feedback. Logically, if there is a proven negative feedback, then it proves the concept of “greenhouse gases warming” to be false. But, as I said, you can not have both at the same time.”

Tom P:”Your banking analogy nicely demonstrates where Monckton’s maths let him down. Both of the bank balances have the same growth, but you can’t calculate the ratio of the final amount to the initial amount over, say, five years by just knowing the amount that the balance has increased in that time. You need to know the starting balance for that.”

I agree with what you have posted here and not having gone through the calculations myself, I am willing to assume that you have the correct context for them. I thought the point at issue is whether the ratio of conc. increase(or change in concentration) to emissions is (more or less) constant but I may well be mistaken. I can agree (as you state later on) that if the two methods of calculating temp change (using emissions and concentrations) give substantially different answers, then one of them(at least ;) ) must be wrong.

richard telford says:
September 3, 2012 at 3:24 am

Respectfully, this post is mistaken. You are correct that all evaporation is balanced by condensation but what you have missed is where these two processes take place. Evaporation takes place at the surface and condensation takes place overwhelmingly in the atmosphere. This has the effect of moving heat higher up into the atmosphere where it is more easily emitted to space.

”
Jim D says:
September 3, 2012 at 9:46 am
cba, the net effect of IR at the surface is cooling. This is also good for mixing. The only thing downward IR does is reduce the cooling rate, and the ocean stays warmer that way.

”
not if the net result is to generate more h2o vapor and more clouds.

I shall go with Dr. Courtney, whose identity and expertise are known to me, and not with Tom P, who continues to lurk behind a mere pseudonym and appears to have some difficulty with elementary logic. The reason why my calculations differ from those of the IPCC is that I have determined the IPCC’s implicit linear relationship between CO2 concentration change and temperature change from its predictions of both over the 21st century (for it cannot be determined from observation), and I have determined the relationship between CO2 emissions growth and CO2 concentration growth from the period 1960-2008, because it can be determined from observation. My purpose in introducing emissions per Kelvin of warming to the calculation is that, for the first time, it allows a respectable determination of the fraction of observed warming that is attributable solely to CO2, from which a tolerably reliable determination of climate sensitivity also becomes possible.

Since both of these relationships – CO2 emissions change vs. concentration change and concentration change vs. temperature change – are near-invariant over relevant timescales, I may legitimately regard them as constants over the period of study without significant error. Therefore, I may – again, legitimately – take their product and use it to establish the results in my paper.

I do not obtain different results by the use of emissions and by the use of concentrations, for the blindingly obvious reason that I use both in the calculation. The reason why I have obtained a result different from that of the IPCC is that the IPCC has exaggerated climate sensitivity over the period of study.

One understands that Tom P. and many others who have commented here have passionate, aprioristic beliefs that my result calls greatly into question: but science is not done by overruling the data aprioristically: it is done by rational and logical examination of the evidence. That is what I have tried to do here, and none of the arguments advanced thus far call the result credibly into question.

You now claim “I do not obtain different results by the use of emissions and by the use of concentrations”.

When you first solve for the warming in equation 1 using just the concentration values of 316.9 ppm in 1960 and 385.6 ppm in 2008, you correctly obtain a value of 0.46 K. However, when you use the well derived linear relationship between concentration and emissions to recalculate the warming, you obtain “by the present method” a value of 0.28 K.

This you claim gives an independent constraint on a lower climate sensitivity. But your “present method” is plainly wrong, as it only uses the growth in emissions between the two dates. As I have clearly shown in my comment of September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm, correctly rewriting equation 1 in terms of the emissions values gives a value of 0.44 K, not 0.28 K.

But apparently you now believe 0.28K is no different from 0.46K.

You have not only reinvented the wheel as square. You are now insistent that despite everyone seeing that your wheel clearly has four sides, it is still in fact a circle.

Quite a lot of arguments about simple facts, let’s repeat some:
Carbon emissions are the product of human activity: that are added on the top of natural emissions (which are probably reversible and stay in check with the natural sinks). Before the industrial age it is assumed that the CO2 concentration was more or less constant at about 280 ppm.
Two diagrams show both carbon emissions and CO2 concentration, in absolute terms and in annual increases. See : http://db.tt/xRXF52CI and http://db.tt/xfOIcSnV

Not all emitted CO2 stays in the atmosphere: calculated over the past 260 years the balance indicates that about 1/3 was absorbed to form of biomass or carbonate sediments, and 2/3 remained in the atmosphere (a slight accumulation as diluted gas in the ocean contributes to some acidification; ultimately this also goes to biomass and sediments). See: http://db.tt/unQGb4LZ
For each billion tons carbon emitted you can expect a CO2 concentration increase of 0.46 ppm.

In 2010 the emissions were 9.1 billion tons (CDIAC), therefore we could have expected the atmospheric CO2 concentration to increase by 4.2 ppm, but it was only 2.4 ppm (there is a time lag to take into account, but this pattern repeats itself every year).

Then you can argue about temperaure sensitivity: forcing as a result of atmospheric CO2 concentration change, a logarithmic dependency:
ΔF = 5.35 · ln(2) = 3.7 W m-2 for each doubling of CO2.
Since the beginning of industrial age: ΔF = 5.35 · ln(391/280 )= 1.79 W m-2 .

Depending on the model used (a linerization is allowed if changes are small) this means that the Earth surface temperature should have increased by approx. 0.37 °C just because of carbon emissions.

Then comes the system feedback to this primary forcing: as it is a net negative one, the temperature increase will remain at a lower level. Depending on the model and parameters used this may be approx. 0.29 °C (see model example: http://db.tt/BQuIQDyu).
Or for any doubling of CO2 concentration we could expect an increase of approx 0.6 °C.

These figures are much more modest than the dire predictions of any IPCC scenario. This is the important conclusion.
All other changes must be linked to other causes; but this cause (anthropogenic carbon emissions) cannot be dismissed as deniers do.

Apologies, I obviously overgeneralised when I said that everyone can see that Monckton’s reinvented wheel is square. You are clearly an exception.

I suggest you go carefully through my post of September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm to see why the emissions data gives a warming of 0.44 K, not Monckton’s incorrect value of 0.28 K. Let me know if you have any difficulty following it.

In response to your post addressed to me at September 4, 2012 at 5:20 am, I commend that you take note of my post addressed to you at September 4, 2012 at 2:58 am. I repeat that it was sincere and kindly.

In all of this you have assiduously avoided addressing Tom P’s substantive points. You rail against his name, but it matters not a whit if he styles himself as Peter Pan if his argument is sound, and thus far you have done nothing to demonstrate that Tom P is incorrect.

Oh, there’s been a lot of huffing and puffing, but anyone who is numerate can see quite plainly that you are prevaricating. Indeed, it seems that you are caught in a recursive loop of avoidance, so I would suggest a simple way to break the deadlock.

Write your “proof of an independent constraint on climate sensitivity” in exactly a form that would be presented to a professionally reviewed journal. You know, similar to the draft paper that Anthony Watts released just over a month ago. Include in it a rebuttal of Tom P’s disputation. Doing so will not only cement your case if you are correct, it will also show that you understand the mathematics and physics sufficiently that you are able to engage at that level.

If you can construct such an argument, then real scientists might take you seriously. Otherwise, all you are good for is fodder for the so-called “skeptical side”.

Don’t forget my tussles with Steven Goddard with his perpetual promises of an arctic ice recovery. He never accepted his ice thickness calculations were wrong, though the money he lost this melt season might concentrate his mind.

That reminds me, I have that bet with Charles the Moderator on whether 2008 was the start of a cooling trend…

“Tom P.” and “Bernard J”, both skulking behind pseudonyms (and perhaps, as Dr., Courtney points out, the same person – just one reason why pseudonyms are a bad idea), merely repeat “Tom P.”‘s original and very silly error, which I have already fully dealt with. “Tom P.”, thoroughly defeated, now resorts to a combination of semantic quibbling and vituperative, ad-hominem remarks.

One need say no more about the ad-hom remarks except that they are characteristic of the climate-extremist movement; that they are one of the chief reasons why it has so abjectly lost the argument; and that they constitute a sub-species of the fundamental fallacy of logic known to the medieval schoolmen as ignoratio elenchi (ignorance of the appropriate manner of conducting an argument, in that red herrings are introduced).

As to the semantic quibble, the IPCC came to one value for climate sensitivity and I came to another. The two results are self-evidently different. However, I used values for both CO2 emissions and CO2 concentrations in reaching my value. The purpose of using the CO2 emissions was to establish what fraction of the observed warming from 1960-2008 was represented by changes in CO2 concentration, which stand in a near-invariant ratio to changes in CO2 emitted.

Where the ratios of CO2 emissions growth to CO2 concentration change and of CO2 concentration change to temperature change are broadly constant, the ratio of CO2 emissions growth to temperature change will also be broadly constant, and “Tom P. / Bernard J.” continue, erroneously, to insert a quite unnecessary additional term into the equation.

Dr. Courtney is an IPCC reviewer. I know who he is and what his qualifications are. Because I do not know who “Tom P. / Bernard J.” is, I do not know at what level I should pitch my replies to his/their arguments. But it appears that he/they do not have a good grasp of elementary mathematics, which is perhaps why they are insufficiently equipped, intellectually speaking, to comprehend their error.

Really? Where?
I have looked through the last several of Tom P’s comments and find not a single comment that could be so characterised.

Christopher Monckton, on the other hand, has interacted with those with whom he is in dispute in the following terms:

“Mr. [Xxxxx] should really not waste any more time displaying his bottomless ignorance on this site.
he tries – I fear deliberately – to muddy the waters
All he does with his childishly petulant and shamefully ill-informed interventions is to clarify before everyone the depth and breadth of his own ignorance. his interventions are perhaps of value in that they are yet further visible evidence of the sad level of general scientific and forensic ignorance
it is intellectually dishonest of “[Xxx X]” who continues to lurk furtively behind a pseudonym
Mr. [Xxxxx] whines … Let him do some reading before he makes a still greater idiot of himself …
it is intellectually dishonest of him … “

Your inconsistencies, both mathematical and rhetorical, are both so clearly displayed to anyone who cares to read this thread, there’s little to add. But you additionally seem now to be confused by Mr. Courtney (I am led to believe he has no PhD) that for some reason I might share an identity with Bernard J.

Bernard J. is just making a question that I’m sure has crossed the minds of nearly all who have read this thread (I feel I should except the mind of Mr. Courtney): where is your working to rebut the calculation I presented September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm that emissions gives a warming of 0.44 K, rather than the 0.28 K you erroneously calculated?

You have had five days to work on this, and attempt a rescue of your claim that you have discovered an independent constraint on warming. Without any rebuttal, this thread demonstrates something rather different to what you set out to prove.

Christopher Monckton claims, “An independent constraint on climate sensitivity now exists.”
Hubris.
Only when your article has been peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal and withstood the scrutiny of the scientific community would you be entitled to make such a claim.

With respect to your comment about me, at least you have not presented the usual warmist lie that Monckton of Brenchley is not a Lord. Such demeaning of people is normal by warmists, but it is reprehensible.

Christopher Monckton claims, “An independent constraint on climate sensitivity now exists.”
Hubris.
Only when your article has been peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal and withstood the scrutiny of the scientific community would you be entitled to make such a claim.

Clearly, you have no understanding of science and/or logic.

Every scientific finding may be – probably will be – overthrown in time, but it cannot be said that a scientific finding does not exist merely because you don’t like how and where it was published.

According to you Newton did not provide an independent assessment of gravity, Einstein did not provide a theory of relativity, and the Wright brothers did not establish aeronautics.

There were no peer-reviewed journals for Newton to publish in, the relativity papers were published in Nature without being put to peer review, and the seminal work on aeronautics was published as an article in a magazine about bee keeping.

Richard Courtney
Even the very preliminary assessment of Monckton’s article provided by this forum has indicated there may be serious problems with it. My assessment, for what it’s worth, is that it would never pass peer review, but if Monckton wishes to attempt that hurdle then let him do so. Until such time, don’t expect those who find fault with it to agree that “An independent constraint on climate sensitivity now exists.”
As for your comparison – however tenuous – between the preliminary status of Monckton’s efforts and those of Newton and Einstein… . Really, don’t be ridiculous.
The Internet is awash with all manner of strange ideas. Are we to accord preliminary acceptance of these just because in the past major advancements have passed through a similar stage?

BTW, I do love the juxtaposition of “Clearly, you have no understanding of science and/or logic.” with “Play the ball and not the man.” Quite delicious.

“With respect to your comment about me, at least you have not presented the usual warmist lie that Monckton of Brenchley is not a Lord. Such demeaning of people is normal by warmists, but it is reprehensible.”

There is no doubt Monckton is a lord, though purely by accident of birth. The US wisely dispensed with deferring to anyone by their title merely on the basis of parentage.

In fact Monckton tried to attain an elected position in that House, but his candidacy gained precisely zero votes.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the flawed mathematics of Monckton’s post. He has failed to produce any rebuttal of the calculation I presented September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm. You seem to be the only defender of Monckton’s position left. Maybe you could oblige?

I most certainly am not Tom P, although I am utterly delighted to be confused with him. However, anyone familiar with the various mainstream climate blogs would know that I post under just the one name – I don’t have time for sock puppetry – and that I speak in a different voice to Tom P. If you doubt this, ask the moderators here to check the IP addresses as they often do – they’ll demonstrate that Tom and I are not only in different places, but likely in very different parts of the world.

I elect not to use my full name because I learned long ago, to my bitter frustration, that to do so invites so much spam as to render my institutional email accounts entirely unusable. There’s also the secondary fact of having been threatened with physical harm on at least one occasion when I posted of a forum that allowed private messaging. It should matter not though whether you know my identity or Tom’s – the fact of his rebuttal of Monckton’s ‘analysis’ is sufficient that the discussion should focus on that only. And after all, there are countless dismissers of global warming on this blog who are even more anonymous than I – ‘Smokey’ for example – and whose posts are never questioned just because they are anonymous.

The substantive point remains. Tom P has constructed a straighforward mathematical refutation of Monckton’s “proof”. If Monckton disputes the refutation he has but to construct his own mathematical demonstration, side-by-side with Tom P’s if need be, and demonstrate with equations and the cold, hard logic of mathematics and physics where he is correct and where Tom P is not. If Monckton has faith in his “proof”, he would construct his argument in exactly this fashion, as if preparing for publication, because his “proof” is (or should be) intended to refute the scientific consensus, and not to simply convince the ‘sceptical’ laiety using ambiguous waffle.

Don’t be concerned about my ability to understand a highly mathematical explanation, Mr Monckton. I completed two years’ study of the subject in my undergraduate degree, and I’ve used it routinely in my Masters and PhD work, and in my professional positions. If you attend to presenting your case clearly and comprehensively, I will attend to the simple task of understanding it.

And of course, when all is said and done, it doesn’t matter if I am but a chimney sweep – Monckton’s claim is what it is, and should be presented and defended at the level that it can be unambiguously understood by professional experts in the field.

I want to address the original analysis the way I imagine some PhD supervisor might. Of course attempts to find upper or lower bounds for the climate sensitivity parameter λ are potentially of interest, although a more useful method would be empirical investigation of feedback mechanisms in the past or improvements to GCMs or other models.

I would suggest trying to focus on a more specific subject. Potentially the most interesting thing in the article is Fig 1, supposedly showing a constant ratio between CO2 emissions and rate of concentration growth. This raises questions. Could a smoothed trend be reconciled with findings that the proportion of CO2 taken up by oceans is declining because of acidification? (See for instance Le Quéré et al, Saturation of the Southern Ocean CO2 Sink Due to Recent Climate Change. Science. 2007, 316(5832):1735-8. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5832/1735.abstract and http://lgmacweb.env.uea.ac.uk/ajw/Reprints/Schuster_Watson_JGR_in_press.pdf). Are other sinks compensating, or are the calculated values insufficiently precise to show this?

Or in fact is the ratio between CO2 emissions and CO2 concentration not fixed in the way Monckton assumes it is? As has been pointed out in some responses, it’s not simple, and also fitting a line to the values should show the standard deviation or error bars to avoid inviting unwarranted conclusions. If in 2013 there were no net CO2 emissions, would concentration stay the same as would be predicted by this simple linear relationship? No, it should fall slightly, because CO2 concentrations are no longer at equilibrium with the sinks. In fact, you should be able to see why the suggested correlation is only an accident of the fact that emissions have been increasing very roughly exponentially. Monckton connects the proposed relationship to Dr Pat Michaels, so could pursue any significance of the graph with him.

Several assumptions appear to be based on as-yet unpublished research. Monckton comments “Before I wrote the paper, I carried out careful calculations to satisfy myself that over the relevant period the relationship between changes in CO2 concentration and changes in temperature was very nearly linear because the climate-sensitivity parameter tended to grow with time, and that would offset the logarithmic decline in the forcing effectiveness of CO2.” This does sound like an excuse for an error pointed out by Tom P. Shouldn’t those “careful calculations” have been part of the article?

Calculations

Going back to the introduction, there appears to be an error in the method for derivation of λ[2000-2100], since it relies on the “mean of the values on all six IPCC emissions”. The value derived is 0.44 K W^–1 m^2. To demonstrate the error, let’s use Monckton’s derived value, (ignore all forcings other than CO2), and for simplicity imagine there were three scenarios rather than six:

Now we perform the calculation as in the introduction and take the mean of 368, 563 and 860, which is 597 ppmv; and the mean of the temperatures, exactly 1 K. According to Monckton’s tacit assumption, we should get the λ value 0.44 that applies in each scenario. However, 1/[5.35 ln(597/368)] = 0.386 K W^–1 m^2. 0.44 isn’t 0.39. What is wrong here? Well, taking a mean of values isn’t going to correspond to a mean of their exponents, so Monckton’s method will give a somewhat lower value for λ than is proper. What might be more interesting is to perform the calculation for each scenario in turn, and see not just the mean but the range of derived values for λ[2000-2100]. This might even be used to add an error range to the result. The calculated equilibrium λ “0.88” is plausible, but it should be remembered that this does not include long-term things like ice-sheet melt and clathrate release. (Also note Monckton committing an analogous error later in taking a mean of a series of quotients and assuming it should be the quotient from dividing the totals.)

I am less concerned by the lack of inclusion of committed warming “carried forward” at 2100, which people have mentioned, than conclusions drawn from neglecting warming “brought forward” to 1960. (Monckton argues in comments that that any warming postponed after 2100 is the distant future and unimportant. However, I suggest it may be worth studying the various modelled climate response functions. Again Monckton may be underestimating the difference between a linear relationship and a roughly exponential one: even if 90% of the committed warming from before 2000 is expressed by 2100, committed warming in the next century may not be negligible. Jim D says “Monckton assumes all the 0.6 degrees is lost from the pipeline, leaving nothing in the pipeline at the end”. IPCC-AR4 WG1 10.7 is relevant; note also that this is based not just on constant CO2 concentration, but also constant negative forcings from aerosols. If aerosols were removed, the committed warming unmasked to 2100 could be much higher; see http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full. The 1.56 K figure in Monckton’s introduction maybe should be revised with negative forcings in mind.)

Anyway, the omission of “pipeline” warming in 1960 causes a number of problems in the article. Calculation (1) resulting in a figure of 0.46K is described as a “estimate of CO2-driven warming from 1960-2008″, whereas the earlier one-sided omission of pipeline effects means that it would be better described as an “calculated value of warming from 1960-2008 driven by CO2 emissions between 1960-2008″. So to match the intended description, and compare with observed warming, there would need to be a separate term added corresponding the inherited warming from prior to 1960. (Of course, using λ[2000-2100] as a basis for λ[1960-2008] is error-prone not only because one is a 100-year period and the other is about half that.)

The other omission is similar in Monckton’s second calculation, in the paragraph before the “Implications” section. “CO2-driven warming expected over the period, by the present method, was 975 divided by 3450, or 0.28 K”, again neglecting any delayed effects.

The article appears to contradict one of its own assumptions: of the 2.8 K “central” rise to 2100, “0.6 K is stated to be in the pipeline” is used in both methods of calculating λ[1960-2008], but the suggested conclusions are “feedbacks operating over the short to medium term may have been net-negative” and “there is no warming in the pipeline from past emissions”. This contradiction with starting assumptions would need further explanation. (Richard Telford observes “feedbacks are not the only issue relevant to warming in the pipeline”, rightly pointing to the slow thermal response of oceans. See eg Meehl et al (2005) How much more global warming and sea level rise? Science 307:1769–1772. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/307/5716/1769.full)

The main problem

Jim D, Tim P, Slioch and Richard Telford comment on the overall method and assumptions, but I think do not sufficiently emphasise what I will propose as the central, rather startling, flaw in the paper. Monckton’s comments summarise his intended approach more clearly than in the article: “I have determined by a straightforward analysis the ratio of annual emissions to annual concentration changes; I have deduced from the IPCC’s own central estimates the ratio of concentration changes to temperature change that it considers likely [to 2100]; I have applied that ratio to total global CO2 emissions since 1960″.

In fact the analysis consists of two different ways of applying the same IPCC projections back to observations from 1960-2008: firstly, by deriving a lowish value for λ[2000-2100], “0.44 K W^–1 m^2″, and taking it as a value for λ[1960-2008] and reaching the value 0.46 K for past warming. Secondly, through a more complex method arriving at the value “223 ppmv K^–1″ (a minor error here is that 345/1.56 = 221 to 3sf), and rather than applying this directly to past concentration changes, deriving an unconventional and measure “3450 GTe CO2 K^–1, the quantum of CO2 emissions necessary to raise global temperature by 1 K”, and finally reaching 0.28 K for past warming.

The central misconception in the article is because the first method (in the first two sections) assumes the relationship between CO2 concentration and mean surface temperature is logarithmic, while the second denies the logarithmic relation that has been accepted up to that point, and following the statement “few non-linearities will obtrude at sub-centennial time-scales” (in fact this is a centennial timescale and non-linearities obtrude very much), suddenly assumes the exact same relationship is linear.
1.56 / ln (713/368) * ln (385.6/316.9) = 0.46 K
1.56 / (713-368) * (385.6-316.9) = 0.311 K

This latter figure is what you get if you apply Monckton’s “223 ppmv K^–1″ directly to observed CO2 changes for 1960-2008 (actually you get 0.308 because of an aforementioned minor arithmetic error). The remaining smaller difference between 0.311 and Monckton’s favoured value of variously “975 divided by 3450, or 0.28 K” or “as little as 0.27 K W –1 m2″, is mostly owing to Monckton’s assumptions when applying the error-prone and probably high “3450 GTe CO2 K^–1″ instead of his “223 ppmv K^–1″, as Tom P points out. (Does this discrepancy imply that response of CO2 concentration to emissions is projected to be somewhat lower in 2000-2100?)

As I hope is now clearer, these back-of-the-envelope-and-log-tables calculations use exactly the same figures, but different assumptions about the arithmetical relationship between GHG concentration and temperature perturbation. Rather than settle on one of the contradictory assumptions and use it consistently throughout, Monckton takes the ratio between the two results, approximately “61%”, and somehow assumes the discrepancy is the fault of the models, despite having used the same results from them for both methods, and further assuming the ratio can be used it to lower the values of “CO2-driven warming” and “λ appropriate to a 50-year period” proportionately. It would be just as logical to deduce that the 0.27/0.28 figure, which is also derived from the projections, is clearly too low for observed warming or for the derived 0.46 K or for theoretical λ[0], and therefore the GCM models underestimate warming. Monckton then reaches grandiose conclusions, including “all attempts at mitigation will prove cost-ineffective” (no references, or other mention of costs or mitigation), and “I have found that the IPCC’s central estimates of CO2-driven warming over the period are overstated by almost two-thirds” (unsupported, unless the fictitious figure 39% is almost two-thirds), all of which are based on nothing but his own confusion.

I’m not convinced Monckton reads at all carefully before responding at length; on this comments page misreading the intention of a formula and then “reciprocal of the reciprocal” resulted in acknowledged and unnecessary confusion. The reference to “Table 3″ after the figure “713 ppmv” is apparently mistaken, as Table 3 is actually about historic concentrations. In general, the analysis lacks the rigour to draw any conclusions whatsoever. I do not mean this to be an exhaustive list of errors in Monckton’s paper, but it should be a rough indication of areas the author should check before presenting something publicly. This method most certainly does not arrive at a valid bound on the value of climate sensitivity.